


The Love Trick

by HardlyFair



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Slow Burn (Good Omens), Angelic and Demonic Powers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale and Crowley Through The Ages (Good Omens), Aziraphale can sense love, Crowley senses the bad stuff and Aziraphale senses the good stuff, Digital Art, Empath, Falling In Love, Good Omens Big Bang, Historical References, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Love Confessions, Love Sense, M/M, Magical Realism, Mutual Pining, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Soft Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21975730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardlyFair/pseuds/HardlyFair
Summary: Crowley had always known Aziraphale to feel Love. There were other emotions, too, at the beginning - always from people, places, things. Besotted as he is, Crowley can't seem to keep up with concealing his failings while trying to teach himself the same trick.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 63
Kudos: 263
Collections: Good Omens Big Bang 2019





	1. Part One

_4004 BCE. The Garden, Earth._

This angel was special. Took Crawly all of thirteen seconds to work that out. 

As the new rain pattered over the angel’s wing, Crawly watched the pair of humans reach for each other’s hand. He looked down at his own with a pensive frown, examining the palm and every notch of soft skin beside his fingernails. Tendons stretching over knuckles, muscles moving in the wrist. Delicate. Strange. 

What other funny things were humans planning to invent?

He narrowed his yellow eyes against the wind-blown sand kicked up by the beginnings of a long storm. Sheer black robes rippled around his bare ankles, unencumbered by the weight of rain that glazed the angel beside him, and a stray red ringlet breezed over Crawly’s shoulder. 

Adam and Eve were leaving the Garden behind. They weren’t even glancing back. The Garden was history to them, and empty, and now what was Crawly supposed to do? Crawly felt a bit bad about the whole situation, to be quite frank. He hadn’t meant to force them out of the Garden - they’d hardly been here for more than a handful of days before _bump!_ the all-knowing foot kicked them out the door. 

Without facing the angel to his right, he asked, “How’d you figure she’d been having a bad day?”

At his peripheral, Crawly saw the angel regard him skeptically. _You ask a lot of questions. You talk a lot, especially to the Enemy._ Their conversation should have ended as soon as it began, or - as was preferred by Hell - before it started.

“Not like you spoke to her or anything.” Crawly paused, considering the idea. In all likelihood, interacting with the humans was a strict no-go for the angel. He’d probably been up here for a while, knew the rules and the objectives. Crawly had seen him lingering on the peat moss down below, far from the gate where he'd been meant to be, all concerned frowns and white light. Could've been doing Heavenly things, fair, although something curious shivered through Crawly upon setting eyes on him, which told him otherwise. 

But if he’d given away his sword, who knew what else he was capable of? Talking to Eve? Adam? _Crawly_?

Crawly turned, profile backlit by pale clouds and the shadow of the white wing outstretched above him. The angel was damp, water gracing his soft hair in gleaming drops, and drapery around his shoulder had gone near-translucent, clinging to the shape of his skin.

He was silent, so Crawly instigated. “Did you?” 

“Heavens, no,” said the angel finally, smiling belatedly into the rain, and Crawly snorted. “That’s your job. I _felt_ it. Clear as day.”

Clear as the day wasn’t anymore - the rain increased, more grey clouds shuttering overwing, and Crawly tucked himself nearer to the angel, who did not shuffle away. The white feathers fanned to create a better barrier.

_Felt_ it?

Something about Crawly’s face must’ve given him away, for the angel picked up his process of thought again, his wing stretching absent-mindedly to provide better cover.

“Happiness. Or, rather, the absence of it. They’d been so...” the angel sighed dreamily. “So content. Peaceful. Accepting. They were content, and then they weren't, and so something was wrong. I felt it since I first arrived. Didn’t you?” the angel asked, folding his hands serenely at his abdomen. He fiddled with the broad golden ring on his little finger. Crawly’s eyes were drawn to it, wondering how it would shine in sunlight.

Crawly’s expression went blank. He sniffed, glancing away again. “No.”

“You were _much_ closer to her,” the angel went on, now obviously confused. “You _must’ve_.”

Devil, did the angel have to put emphasis on everything? Must he speak like every word was something to hang on? Irritation crept into Crawly’s new lungs at the implication he’d merely _missed_ Eve’s feelings, pushing a leaden weight down in his belly and curling his upper lip in distaste. 

Crawly had felt nothing _peaceful_ from Eve because there had been nothing peaceful to feel.

From her and Adam, he’d felt only fear. 

A taste for answers, foiled, sour on the back of his tongue. Once upon a time, he’d felt the same way deep inside of himself, somewhere that never unfolded. The jagged curl of apprehension struck him upside the head, a feeling tinged with caution and bitterness. His hair had stood up with it, the flesh on his arms had raised.

He hadn’t known there was something else to miss.

Even now, far off where Eve and Adam disappeared over the final dune, dark lines of wary concern teased the back of Crawly’s mind. Trouble was to be found in these lands. These humans needed desperate help to be bad, to be good. They didn’t know what they were doing out there.

The lion was just the start of it. 

That was what came after the Apple. No forgiveness incoming.

But this angel didn’t need to know that. Keep secrets from your enemy, wasn’t that the point? Better to let the angel believe he possessed identical capabilities, ones that included sensing contentedness and peace as much as upset and agitation.

“Must not have been paying proper attention,” Crowley said. 

The angel tipped his head to the side, clearly unhappy with the explanation and far too polite to ask for a better one. It was the best Crawly was going to give, and when he extended his reach to subtly check, there it was, the icy flash of annoyance peaking from the angel’s direction. Cold, like the rain and the clouds. It crested, then disappeared again into calamity.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Crawly asked, surprising himself with the urge to know.

The angel answered automatically, “Aziraphale,” and then had the gall to look shocked at his will to reply. There was power to a name.

It was a nice expression, Crawly thought, that perplexed tilt to the angel’s brow and the anxious lines by his pouted mouth, with the raindrops caught in his pale hair. It made him seem nearly mortal, so affected by the Earth and its two humans. 

Aziraphale got over it quickly for the sake of politeness. He twisted his ring again. Haltingly, he asked, “And yours?”

Crawly rolled a name around in his head for a moment. “Crawly.”

“Crawly,” Aziraphale echoed. Tentatively, he smiled, looking at Crawly and away again, watching after the wandering humans, while tiny pouts dimpled each corner of his lips. “How nice.”

-/- 

_3000 BCE. North Africa, Africa._

Feelings on Earth grew worse. 

It wasn’t just Adam and Eve anymore. They made little, other humans, and the other humans made other humans, and so on, and then things were simple, for a time, with surface issues like hunger and familial worry growing predominant. They grew worse as humans came together because humans had such a penchant for making each other feel terrible. New, spicy things curled hot on Crowley’s tongue: the idea of a forbidden craving for something you could never have, the heartache in a summer wind, or the pain of listening to someone’s bad poetry.

How was that angel faring? If secreted, bitter things were being invented, surely there must’ve been some good as well. That was how these things worked, wasn’t it? Balance and all that… How did it taste, how did it simmer beneath the skin, how did it sink into his bones? How did Aziraphale feel? If he felt anything other than bad, then Crowley would never know.

The forfeited sword haunted Crowley’s dreams for centuries.

The Almighty was sure to find out. 

Scratch that, She definitely already knew. And she wasn’t really the forgiving type. 

-/- 

_1900 BCE. Knossos, Greece._

Most of Crowley's time was spent in quiet places, here, where most everything was still of water and calm of path. 

Like Aziraphale had said at the Beginning, there was an absence - an absence of what Crowley was accustomed to feeling - in places of peace. No blips on the map. A lapse in the sufferings and saltslick misery of the rest of the world, a place where things were gentle and unassuming, simple and minimalist, with white clouds and no storms. Spending time here was justified, because if anyone were to ask, Crowley could explain he was present to spread dissonance and anarchy in a place where it was most missed. 

Really, he just enjoyed the quiet. The gloom of the Earth suffocated, choked, and drowned him; at times it became too much to consider. And this was fine and well for any other demon, but when you were on Earth for so long, you began to grow sick of the hurt. Small doses, underkill. Crowley grew to like the quiet. 

The curl of an olive branch twisted in Crowley's hand as he gazed upon the town on the edge of the island, overlooking it from the shade of a grove. Easy ocean salt was carried in on the breeze, lifting over Crete and settling nicely over the stones in town. It was quiet here, but still he waited for the other shoe to drop.

Humans rarely went quiet for long. 

-/-

_37 BCE. North of the Sahara Desert, Africa._

Humans ended up inventing loads of funny things. Hands to hold weren’t even the beginning. Neither were olive groves, sandals, or howdahs. 

There were villages, for a start. Where they came together and lived communally, on purpose! Crowley couldn't begin to imagine why. He never liked the towns so much, but Aziraphale found it delightfully refreshing. Seemed an awful lot of work, helping each other survive the eastern flatland, when it was much simpler to look out for themselves. No, people had to go and make families and friends and the like. 

Crowley took up residence in an outpost commune in the steppelands for a spell, with wind and shortgrass and blue mountains only in the far distance. Wasn't as fun as roaming.

_Who was content to settle in one place?_ Crowley tempted a patriarch of the small settlement, _Look at how the prairie dies around you. Look at how you affect the world. Couldn't you do so much more, out there? Trample the land, scale the mountains, flush the river free of fish, find the bear and take its coat._

No, the steppes weren't very much fun. Bit too easy - there was nothing out there and everything anywhere else. Crowley trailed a group of migratory nomads southwards for some long months, watching them lose their ancestral path again and again until he grew bored. Their red-hot frustration warmed him, soothing away the pricks of cold distress that the ruins of the north had left him with. 

It was ruins in which he now stood alone, blackened hunks of pliable reeds and ripped woven sheets scattered at his bare feet, when his head snapped up. His nostrils flared, skin growing clammy. The sky had darkened in the last few hours, light blue ceding to a dreamy purple. 

By the ground, terror crouched in tight coils. Low here, twisted black and red by time and wind, it wound around Crowley's ankles, making threats to pull him into the Earth and back to Hell. _Bugger off_ , he thought maliciously at it, but it wasn't really its fault. It took time for the ripples of a tragedy to melt away from their focal point. These tendrils of cold fear might linger here for decades; a whole town, gone in a few hours, years ago, leaving nothing behind but an aftertaste in Crowley's throat and pieces of old limestone. 

A rush of fresh worry reached Crowley, the particular taste long since familiar.

Ah, there he was, emerging from the halflight when Crowley turned. Hadn't seen him in awhile. 

"You!"

“Oh, no,” Crowley said, making a face and trying to pretend like he wasn't caught off-guard by Aziraphale's arrival; he'd been thoroughly distracted by the scale of this horror. “What’re you doing here?”

“What am I— What are _you_ doing here!” Aziraphale exclaimed. If his wings had been revealed, Crowley was sure they would’ve been ruffled and have their primaries out-of-place with surprise.

The angel picked his way through chunks of wood that sunk half into the sand, away from his group of uninterested travelers who were paused on another dune, hiking up his white robes like a dancer. He dusted them off, fussing with red sand grains. Irritation rolled off him, and Crowley tried not to glower in it - there was little room for it amongst the rest. “ _I’m_ here to handle the city.”

Aziraphale was the cleanest thing around for miles. Compared to the dark cloth and heavy turbans of his current people, blending with soil to hide from the smoldering sun, Aziraphale was a lily in bloom, out for light and good weather. Hardly a flush touched his cheeks. The sun was setting somewhere behind him, lending strange light and long shadows to his figure. The white hung around his shoulders, belted up with a golden rope.

“I’m here to handle the city," said Crowley.

“You’ve already done your job!”

Crowley set his jaw, battling against the age-old impulse to shout. Not every demon enjoyed flattening villages. Crowley liked to pick them apart, member by member, until all that was left were empty huts. Setting fires and leveling hard human work became unnecessary when it was much more beneficial to do it slowly, like he'd told the morons in Hell a hundred times prior, there was more to evil than killing. Aziraphale had yet to grasp this.

“You think _I’ve_ done this?” He gestured to the empty township. He kicked the sand for emphasis, and his ankle got caught in cloth from one of the fallen tents. After a few attempts, Crowley kicked free again. Immediately, he stepped on a shard of broken pottery.

Aziraphale’s accusing finger wavered. “You… haven’t done this?”

“No!” Crowley settled his hands on his hips, willing the fresh scrape at his toes to disappear. “It was like this when I got here. Felt it all the way from China. I figured this was more of your ridiculous smiting. Wonder what sins they've committed to deserve this!"

He hadn't figured that, but that's what it took to goad Aziraphale into a solid argument.

“Now, I’ve never _personally_ smited— smitten— smote— _done the act of smiting_ myself! Not against _people._ ”

There it was. Ooh, that insinuation that Aziraphale had done it against _something_ else in the past excited the hair on Crowley’s arms. 

"And why not?" Crowley asked. "Some of them deserve it." He nodded to Aziraphale's group which stood on the rolling hills of sand overlooking the burnt valley, unpacking camels' loads of scarlet cloth and beaded tapestries for a break. A few small children ducked under the cloven feet of a camel, rounding its neck and chasing one another, giggling and diving in the dry sand. They had more energy now that the sun was not sapping their strength. 

A bad example. These people didn't look nor feel like they deserved it.

Fatigue from their travels washed up against Crowley like the tide to a ship, but it was shallow enough to clue him in on the fact that there was more contentedness to them than there was frustration or fatigue. His voice gentled, "What're you doing with them?"

Aziraphale turned to follow Crowley's gaze, face softening as he regarded his travelers. It had to be nice, walking with an angel. Bet they never got misled, found water often, and always had enough to eat, because Aziraphale became rather freehanded with miracles when he was fond of people. Had to be why China was doing so bloody well at the moment. 

“Mark Antony’s just invaded Parthia. My people Upstairs say he’s going to become quite important, so I should facilitate him meeting with Cleopatra. I was supposed to find help here, but.” 

“Who’s that?”

Aziraphale stared at him. His soft-white brows drew together. He could’ve been squinting at the sun if he were facing the other way, but as of now it was behind him, apricot-yellow lighting up his curls, giving him a deep halo. “How long have you been here?”

Crowley sneered, but his eyes were stuck on the effects of the light. “Same as you!”

“No, I meant _here_ here, in Africa. By the Nile?”

“Only a little while. Done some wandering with the nomads in the desert. Great fun for a snake." 

"I see. And where are your nomads now? Perhaps we could do some trading."

Crowley looked down his sharp nose at the ruins. "They figured there wouldn't be much trading to do once we got here. Left."

"Without you?"

"Well," Crowley smiled, glancing up, "I was the navigator who kept getting us lost."

Aziraphale's mouth quirked down, and the tiniest bit of distress leaked away from him, enough for Crowley to taste on the arid evening air like a fine drink, rich and full-bodied. What was that for? Did Aziraphale expect any better?

“Cleopatra’s the ruler of Egypt. She had Julius Caesar killed— I thought you’d had something to do with that.”

“Nope. Desert.”

“Since when?”

“Since whenever. Since as-long-as-I’d-like. Since it’s-none-of-your-business.” 

Aziraphale fixed Crowley with a stern look. 

"Fine. Since yesterday."

"And you've been... what? Sitting demurely in a pile of human ruin?"

For his point, Crowley sunk to the ground. He wedged a crumbling block of sandstone out from under himself and sat back, tilting his face up to Aziraphale and glaring against the fading sunlight. His legs stretched in front of him, heels buried in the loose sand and rubble of a burnt-up town.

A low fog rested here, resigned and quiet sufferings whispering their deaths in Crowley's unwilling ear. Crowley waved a hand beside his head, shooing them away.

Aziraphale shook his head as though dealing with a very young child. Crowley thought he even heard a scoff.

Crowley relaxed, folding his arms behind his head and reclining. “Aren’t your people ever going to get angry with you?”

“For what?”

“For always telling me what you’re doing at places. ‘S practically a greeting.”

“Aren’t yours angry?”

“They’re always angry. Part of being cast out. Usually, they can direct it at someone distinctly not-me,” Crowley said, “But really. I could thwart you, now that I know.”

Aziraphale laughed. Laughed! Crowley’s chest rang with it. It broke the air and even the palpable misery recoiled momentarily, like the deaths that loitered here were stunned themselves. There went the last of the tension from Aziraphale's unfounded accusations. Crowley eased into subtle comfort. 

“Oh, please. _You_ , thwart _me_?”

Crowley propped himself up on his elbows, mouth in a full grin and a laugh startling out of his throat. “I could. I could!” 

“You don’t even know who Cleopatra is!” 

“I know now!” 

“Now that I’ve told you.”

“I would’ve figured it out eventually. You said she was the ruler of Egypt? I’m headed there next, then. Something about a contest of rulers to be done.”

“You _can’t_ go there,” Aziraphale said, “I’m headed there next.” 

Crowley made some vague hand gestures. “Then we’ll _both_ head there, and we’ll _both_ work very hard, and we’ll _both_ have nothing to show for it because we’ll _both_ be there.”

Wasn't a very clever plan. That was what you got, when Heaven and Hell led things - bad plans. Aziraphale dawdled, swaying slightly on his feet. 

"Doesn't really seem like a clever plan, does it?" asked Crowley, drawing out his vowels, swirling a fingertip in the sand by his elbow. "Both of us going to the same place."

"Heaven knows what it's doing."

Ah. Aziraphale still had such hearty, full faith. What would it be like to have that, still? To never ask Hell what it meant? Crowley had no idea. He'd been questioning Hell from the moment he got down there.

So close to getting Aziraphale down from that damn heavenly pedestal. 

“Come down here,” said Crowley, breaking from his teasing. He nodded his chin to the sand around them, then peered back up at Aziraphale. “The sun is disappearing. Your travelers will move on. I’ll find you help for Cleopatra and Antony.”

Aziraphale hesitated, ring in his grip. “I shouldn’t be caught with the likes of you.” 

“Shouldn’t be caught with the likes of _you._ Come down here. It’s warm and I think you’re tired.”

“I am not.”

“Prove it, then.”

Aziraphale glanced to his travelers who were repacking their camel’s loads, and then sat down beside Crowley, leaving a good foot of space between them. The baked earth was radiating heat that the sand had trapped during the day. As a snake, Crowley had learned quickly that close to the ground was the best spot for sunning. A flat rock would be even nicer. No time to relax in a place touched by pain such as here, but in the quiet places some sunning was precisely what was needed.

Leaning his head back, Crowley contemplated heading back to China after this instead of Egypt. There would likely be an awful lot of camel riding involved. Head office wanted him to stir up some trouble near the peninsula. That didn’t sound very interesting, and he never knew what they wanted to gain out of their vague instructions.

He never got to see the whole Plan, even when he was stirring up foment in the centre of it. Did anyone get to see the whole Plan?

Aziraphale breathed out a sigh, drawing Crowley’s attention. Crowley rolled his head onto one shoulder to peer at him. The sky was red now, and Aziraphale’s kind face was half-shadowed - he was sitting up straight, clearly uneasy but getting used to it.

He was staring out at the dunes stretching across the desert. The pink on his cheeks refused to fade even as the sunlight did.

“It’s a beautiful feeling. Isn’t it?” 

What a cocked-up way of putting it. Crowley could have laughed aloud. How nice it had to be, to feel only the good on the planet and none of the bad. How blessed, how perfect the world must appear to Aziraphale! Had he ever seen the destruction like Crowley had? Did he know what miasma threatened them, pouring from the very ground they sat on? 

Instead of letting Aziraphale in on the reality around him, Crowley hummed assent, dodging the question. “Don’t you think everything is beautiful? Angel and all that.”

“Well, certainly, _most_ things are beautiful. Some things are extra beautiful.” Aziraphale nodded to himself, fussing with his golden ring in a way that Crowley had become very used to seeing. It meant he was struggling to find the proper words. “Like this place.”

“It's ash and dust. There's nothing here."

“But there _was_. You can tell. Extend your reach, you’ll see. Close your eyes.”

It wasn’t in his heart for Crowley to glare at Aziraphale, not with the air singing with warmth and the residual fear leeching his motivation, but his disbelief echoed over his expression all the same. Did Aziraphale honestly expect Crowley to go along with this? Aziraphale looked silly when he leaned back, closed his eyes, and breathed in the theoretical Love of this burnt-up town. He looked revoltingly comfortable.

He looked _happy_. 

Problem was, here, that Crowley absolutely was going to go along with this.

Slightly embarrassed, Crowley shut his eyes. 

Beneath the ground, under his feet, the hard soil crawled with feeling. He stretched out his legs, unbending a knee. 

Left behind, imprinted in the sand, were the ghosts of things that died angry. 

Deep auburn twists of desire, scarlet corrupted power, green greed and jealousy all rolled over in mounds of thick, choking human will. They were things he'd spent the last two days mulling over, touching reverently, trying to release from this place. Nothing painful was so easily undone. Crowley shivered. These were things always present for him, stronger or weaker, all around.

He didn’t feel Love among them. Here, or anywhere.

Or perhaps it was here, and he couldn’t pick it out. He was a demon: condemned. He could not feel any Love. It might’ve been there - Aziraphale wasn’t known to be a liar on this front - but if it was, Crowley felt only empty space. No, not even empty space. There wasn’t a place in his mind where he knew Love should fit in, there were simply more echoes of tragedy.

Unnerving, to know what _should_ be there, what _was_ there objectively, and not being able to make sense of it.

“I feel pain,” he said as he opened his eyes, yellow irises narrowing against the horizon’s light, “and death. I feel where the fire razed - someone jealous began it all.” He pointed up the next hill, where the cracked dirt turned into sand at the borders of where the settlement used to be. "There's a great patch of terror there, and over there. It's red and wicked, worse than the sun."

Aziraphale stared openly at him, the heat of concentration gleaming under pale blue. When Crowley tried to meet it, the angel looked away, mouth agape, eyes wild.

“Oh, my,” said Aziraphale in a hatefully pitying tone. Crowley’s ears burned. “I’m - I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize—”

“Enough of that.”

“But, I’m afraid I couldn’t-- that I didn’t-- you can’t--”

“I said _enough_ of that,” Crowley repeated. He crossed his arms. Their powers were different, but equivalent. His head ached. “I’m sure you can’t feel what _I_ can, anyway.”

Aziraphale shook his head, astounded. “Why would I want to?”

He was right, of course. 

And why should Crowley covet the reverse? Why should he miss what wasn't there, what didn’t appear to him, what had been taken from his sights? Beauty and Love and the soft things. Why would Crowley want to feel what Aziraphale did? Crowley was gifted at sensing these plights of past human nature, of human past. Shouldn’t want to change. And he didn’t. Absolutely not. He set his jaw, pointedly glancing away. 

Nerves crawled up his throat, clogging and draining without purpose. By God, what was the point of anxiety? "I don't know how that feels," he said bluntly. “And you don’t know how I feel. It’s different perceptions, like shrimp and people.”

Aziraphale was silent. 

"I can't feel it like you do."

"I know."

Crowley _hmm_ ’d. 

_Tell me what it feels like._

Aziraphale turned towards Crowley, face tipped. He was so near, Crowley feared feeling breath on his skin. He thought of how that warmth might shatter his core. Aziraphale’s eyes closed again. His golden lashes fluttered against his cheek, dewpale curls catching the last of the fading sun as he tilted his head in consideration. He was a very beautiful angel, spiritually: he looked like light and eternal optimism, and Crowley watched him closely.

Crowley didn’t say a word.

Aziraphale understood, anyway. His ability to do that might’ve been where Crowley’s troubles began.

“Oh, I can’t be sure of how to describe it,” Aziraphale said after awhile, voice quiet and low. He touched his chest, fingers lazily dragging through the thin white cloth. “How do you explain the feeling of the wind in the trees? Or the ocean against the sand? It’s something that’s always there. It’s warm. In a good way, the way that doesn’t make it feel like the sun is beating down on you. It’s comfortable, like someone is holding your face in their hands.”

Ah, Aziraphale had read too many stories. He was a fair poet. Surely, Crowley could guess some of it.

Aziraphale blinked, brows drawing down, seemingly perplexed all of a sudden. “Although, I don’t remember it _always_ being there. Certainly it wasn’t always as _strong_ , in the beginning.”

“Chalk that up to more humans,” Crowley suggested. 

Aziraphale nodded in thought.

Crowley realistically should’ve let it go. Let that explanation be enough. Something in his heart pulled, tugged, _ached_ , with this curiosity. Never should have given curiosity to humans. And Adam and Eve should never have accepted it! How were any of them to know what it would lead to? How horrible a thing to inflict them with. Damned, blasted, cursed, _fucking_ curiosity. Wasn’t worth the trouble.

The strangest temptation fluttered in his wrists, beating wildly. Why was it like that? Life wasn’t all about love. He tapped his lacquered fingers on his belt, craving distraction, trying and failing to focus on the tickle of his long hair against the underside of his jaw.

He murmured, “Is it? Strong?”

“Sometimes,” replied Aziraphale. “Came on quick, though, didn’t it?” He smiled gently, like all of Heaven’s Light needed to burst from him exactly now, and glanced to Crowley, only to meet with an impassive stare. He realized his error. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“It’s fine. You’re right.” Crowley pushed himself up, drawing his knees close. He’d asked for this.

The sun was fading over the last of the desert’s horizon, spewing rivers of gold over sand dunes like angel blood. The humans and their camels over the next dune would be moving soon, under the cover and fair temperature of night. Under the guidance, perhaps, of their resident angel. Crowley wondered if Aziraphale would be pushing on with them. 

“You’re right,” he repeated, holding tighter to his knees, narrowing his eyes against the last bright glares of the sun. “It did come on quick.”

-/-

_233 CE. The Roman Empire, Europa._

Crowley learned, as time went on. 

That was the trouble with being on Earth: you tended to figure things out. In Hell, everything was eternally the same - damp and dark with moans perforating the sticky ceilings, demons all shoulder-to-shoulder, and lacking the existence of any corner offices.

But on the Earth, you learned. Perhaps Beelzebub’s eternal idiocy and Dagon’s constant _forty-steps-behind_ came from never popping in for a visit.

Aziraphale could feel Love, and little blissful emotions spilling from people and places and things. Aziraphale felt it _everywhere,_ it seemed. When meeting, they passed broken cities and half-tumbled walls and forgotten human places, and everywhere, without fail, there was something or someone that positively overwhelmed Aziraphale with Love. He felt holy spots and sacred sites, blessed temples and consecrated ground. He remarked on satisfaction and Crowley shouldered his way through silent reams of sorrow. 

It was funny, almost, the ways in which Crowley and Aziraphale differed. Until Earth, Crowley had hardly realized that the ability to feel Love had been ripped from him, same as God's ever-caring warmth.

The topic of Crowley’s power, or lack of it in that certain Love department, wasn’t broached for another long while. Aziraphale commented on his own constantly, ready to share what was nice in the world, but Crowley lingered on their conversation in the Sahara, the near-miss, the almost-found-out. What it was that he was hiding, Crowley didn't know. 

No, Crowley felt no Love. 

Not like Aziraphale.

Temperate jungles and empty moor, high mountains and rich cities - how did Love come into the world and infect everything? Crowley certainly didn't put _that_ there, when he showed up in the Garden. He simply wouldn’t have thought to. How did it spread so quickly? Was it by contact, or did every human carry it without knowing? It was a silent killer, stalking the edges of the human mind, ready to unfurl into something disastrous the moment they gave into it. 

Aziraphale would place his hand on his chest and sigh and smile when he felt it coming in waves, and it was so bloody _enticing_. 

Crowley began to feel sparks of envy about it. No, no, not the fact that Aziraphale could sense Love while Crowley couldn’t, he’d come to terms with that, but the fact that the angel could _feel_ it. Really, actually feel it. That it could originate within him and seep out to the rest of Earth. That he could give it as well as he could receive it.

Crowley got neither. He got jealousy, grief, and despair. Pain leaking from the cracks in the earth like phantom scratches. 

Crowley didn’t feel any of the good stuff.

At least, not without the angel around. 

And even then, it must’ve been his imagination.

-/-

_900 CE. Yangtze River Valley, China._

They reclined together on a grassy notch of a hill overlooking leaping lengths of flooded rice paddies. The fair sun gleamed over the water in the valley, reflecting white-bright clouds that floated high above. Crowley tilted his head back. It might be a wonderful day to fly. 

It was quiet here. Which meant it was probably very loud for Aziraphale. The quiet was what had attracted Crowley in the first place, so it made perfect sense that the angel had set up camp in the middle of it like some kind of encouraging force for humanity. Like some kind of angel.

He’d come to learn that where the quiet was, so often was Aziraphale. That definitely was _not_ the reason he sought it out. No.

“Here it is,” Crowley said around the long grass stuck between his teeth. He chewed on the sweet-end, short red curls tickling his cheeks. “If you control the land, you control the rice, and--”

“ _If you control the rice, you control the people,_ ” Aziraphale recited, patting Crowley’s shoulder. “You’ve been going on about that for the entire afternoon. You needn’t be so complicated when I simply asked what you were doing here so early in the growing season.”

“It’s my realization of the century!” Crowley grinned, baring his teeth around the grass. In a lighter tone, he added, “Got you to spend the afternoon, didn’t it? No big plans for Heaven today.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth and held up a finger, then dropped his hand, unable to argue. 

"Come on," Crowley groaned, pushing himself up. His shoulder tingled where Aziraphale had touched it, and he needed a brisk walk down the paddies to resolve that feeling. "I know a lovely tea house where there's no tempting to be done."

-/-  
 _1024\. Göttingen, Europe._

"The way I see it," said Crowley, kicking his legs up onto the tavern table and crossing his feet at the ankles, "we can both keep on doing our respective duties, in the same place, at the same time. We could even have dinner along the way. But we're not going to affect humanity like that. Not properly thought-out is what that is. Seems like a waste of resources." 

Aziraphale nodded gravely into his drink. 

“The Ottonian Dynasty is over with thanks to me. _Us._ The humans will start something new - we’ve affected _something,_ finally _._ What do you think about that? We’re finally seeing the light of a Plan we’ve never seen before. Now we know what to do.”

Aziraphale scoffed. “I doubt we’re meant to--” he leaned towards Crowley and half-covered his mouth in the name of secrecy, “- _-work together._ That doesn’t seem like what the Plan has… planned!”

Crowley jabbed the table with his pointer finger. “All I’m saying is that it seems like a _waste of resources._ There’s nothing worse than sending two people to do the same task. Two people on… different sides.”

“ _Opposite_ sides.”

“Right, like I said. Different sides. Waste of resources.”

"It seems like a waste of resources," Aziraphale said quietly. 

In the dark of their secluded corner, Crowley smiled at Aziraphale.

-/-

_1307\. Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire._

_(Soon to fall to the Ottomans.)_

“Didn’t figure you’d run into me?”

“In a city famous for its churches and mosque?” Aziraphale began. “Forgive me for not expecting you.”

That was sarcasm Crowley was catching wind of. His mouth quirked up at one corner. “What’re you up to, then? Can’t be any blessings - I would’ve taken care of them for you. Besides, this place is blessed enough.”

Around them, the subjects hustled around the centre square, tents erected for morning market over brick walkways. Scents of saffron and high spices drifted to greet them, sizzling meat and exotic fruits. Towering churches and architectural feats lined the cobbled streets, casting shadows that offered refuge from the beating sun. 

There was something brilliant here, some great source of annoyance. Perhaps it was the foot traffic or the encasing walls. Little bits of pain and worry caught Crowley in passing. Another reason to adore urban centers, besides the good drink and fine beds - the nasty feelings were amplified a thousand times over.

Altogether, it made Crowley look very productive without having to be very productive. 

Aziraphale patted Crowley’s elbow in goodbye, already enthralled in the goings-on of the market and walking off.

Crowley held steady for four seconds before he whipped around and followed. Hesitating was no fun when Aziraphale knew Crowley would be at his heels in a moment. Only familiar face about, Crowley was allowed an occasional weakness.

He folded his hands behind his back, glancing around the busy square while Aziraphale slowed. Crowley sniffed casually, trying to catch a whiff of brimstone or something soft-spicy like Heavenly residue. Nothing so much - just the ordinary plights of human folly abounded this bright afternoon, like the stale annoyance that permeated each vendor, or the economic worries of some passing woman. Bitter, and emerald.

“The Hagia Sophia boasts the highest number and best quality of Latin and Greek manuscripts in the world right now. It’s been better, elsewhere,” Aziraphale went on, as if there had been no gap in conversation. Crowley focused his gaze on the angel beside him, releasing his suspicions. 

“Don’t get me started on England at the moment.” Crowley faked a shudder, matching his longer stride to Aziraphale.

The angel was easily distracted, peering into corner tents and stopping to view works of glazed pottery and mosaics.

"It’s horrible what’s going on there,” he said, holding an artisan’s blue dish and examining it like an arts dealer. “No one’s sure of anything. No books, and the ones that are present are being destroyed. All people have is faith. Hardly anyone outside the noble class can read.”

“Thought you’d like that. Only the right people getting knowledge and making decisions.” Crowley leaned coolly against a wooden tent post, crossing his arms. It dug into his shoulder blade the wrong way but it looked nicely casual, so he leaned in further. 

“ _Everyone_ should have the right to decisions. And to knowledge.”

Crowley grinned knowingly. 

Aziraphale realized what he’d said. He pulled away from Crowley and set down the dish, beginning, “That’s-- _not—_ ”

“Shut up, angel. Please. I get it.” Crowley spun around, plucking a few vibrant figs from the next stall over. He knew exactly what to do. “Now, I’ve been here for a few weeks. Let me tempt you to some of the locality.”

“Well,” said Aziraphale, pleasantly surprised. He miracled a coin and handed it to the vendor. He smiled when Crowley handed him one of the fruits, studying it in his hand, amused and delighted. They were bright-ripe purple. “If you insist. I’m in need of a guide.”

“I know the sweetest taverna down the way. Care to join?”

“If you’ve got nothing else on,” Aziraphale said, accustomed to this game. 

Crowley waved a hand, _no trouble._ “I’m free for decades, angel.”

A short time later, the two of them settled at a grainwood table. A decorated pitcher of wine sat in between the two of them, carved with ornate patterns and glazed in orange and seafoam. The hot smell of garlic-and-pepper-spiced goat permeated the taverna’s outdoor seating area. 

The heat of the city warmed the snake inside of Crowley, but when Aziraphale pulled at the collar of his long chiton, leaving half his chest exposed, Crowley miracled a black canvas umbrella to shade their table. It stood out dramatically from the other greys and golds. There were fine white hairs flitting between Aziraphale's pectorals. Crowley was glad for his glasses, concealing his stare as they did.

“Are you really very worried about England?” Crowley asked, swirling his second helping of dark wine in his ceramic cup. Drinking was the best distraction. 

He shrugged off his embroidered cloak, the red and black scale patterning slumping over the back of his seat, and leaned forward, elbows on the table without any regard for manners.

Aziraphale nodded gravely, gaze caught somewhere lower than Crowley's eyes, tracking the line of Crowley’s bare shoulders. His tone turned serious, and he cleared his throat. Crowley smiled snidely, heart fluttering.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “Yes, I am. I’m concerned they won’t be able to pull themselves out of this stupor for a long while," Aziraphale said. 

Crowley debated sharing the information that rested on the tip of his tongue. A man in Germany had invented a sort of... mass printer for books. Organize letters and stamp whole pages of paper at a time! Handwriting and illumination was on its way out. Would that soothe Aziraphale? Or would he grow up-in-arms about the fact that he'd spent the century prior holed up in a monastery, manually copying books for nothing?

Crowley took in the genuine concern from Aziraphale, that niggling stream of unsettled fretting pouring from him like a brook through mountain passes. It was like a fever, something hot and sticky that didn’t go away on its own. Deciding he didn’t want that there anymore, Crowley opened his mouth.

Abruptly, the ambient malcontent of Constantinople grew a hundred times worse.

Crowley's hand flattened to the table like gravity had multiplied over it, the bulk of the air growing heavy. Weight pushed his body down, flattening his arms to the chair. His teeth clicked as his jaw snapped shut.

Aziraphale’s concern was but a wave in a sea of sudden nastiness. He stopped pouring them each a cup of wine, setting the pitcher down with caution. “Crowley? Dear?”

“Ssshut up,” Crowley said, breathless. Some white noise hammered in his ears, demanding the presence of all his senses. 

He stood suddenly, head swiveling as he tried to place the epicenter of this looming disaster. There had to be something coming. Had to be. He hadn’t been scheduled for any earthly damage. But it had to be happening. An earthquake, a volcano, a flood....

Or, an unexpected visit from upper management. It clicked. The faintest trace of sulfur laced the air when Crowley gasped. 

Damn! One afternoon of less-than-constant vigilance and Crowley was going to muck up the whole Arrangement!

“Someone’s here.”

“There’s lots of—”

“No, no, no, someone from head office, someone from Below.” Crowley faced Aziraphale. The cup was halfway to Aziraphale's mouth, paused in shock. “Someone’s just come into the city.” 

Aziraphale tilted his chin up. He leaned back in his seat and took a sip of wine. “Well, let them come.” 

Crowley groaned. There wasn’t time for any of Aziraphale’s bullheadedness. Their visitor could not find Aziraphale here. An angel, in one of the only prosperous cities of the ages? Aziraphale would be blamed for the whole bloody production, despite the fact that he’d only just shown up! Whoever was paying the city a visit (or _Crowley_ a visit, which was nearly worse), would definitely like to be rid of the being assumedly responsible for keeping Constantinople successful. 

“We can finish lunch _later_.” Crowley pushed back his chair and rounded the table, donned his cloak, and seized Aziraphale by the arm. A splash of red landed over Aziraphale’s white clothing, spilt from the cup he stubbornly held onto.

“Oh!” Aziraphale exclaimed, dropping the cup.

“Come on,” Crowley decided, plucking the half-full pitcher from the table and shoving it into Aziraphale’s chest. Reflexively, Aziraphale grabbed it. “You can take it away while we go.”

“‘We?’”managed Aziraphale, allowing himself to be led away from the taverna shade with a hint of regret in his eyes. “Why aren’t you going to greet them?”

“Because. I’m in Constantinople having lunch with an angel of the Lord, and I’m not at all trying to kill him,” Crowley said. Aziraphale smiled like a bastard. “And that sort of thing is frowned upon where I come from.”

There were alleyways between the buildings lining the streets. Crowley steered Aziraphale into one, cool shadows swallowing their figures. Crowley flipped his hood up to obscure his face and glasses.

Who had they sent? Why was Hell sending someone up, anyway? It didn’t make sense - Crowley was doing his job, mostly!

“Crowley, I’m sure you’re overreacting. Who’s going to know you’re here?”

“They always know where I am. I’m sure Heaven always bloody knows where _you_ are.”

Aziraphale looked remiss.

“Besides, I don’t mind if they know where I am, I mind if they find an angel puttering about the city. You're...” Crowley made a vaguely explosive hand gesture at Aziraphale. “I’m not in the mood to figure an Arrangement out with a new angel.”

“Well, it would never work with anyone else. They wouldn’t... see its _convenience_. Especially not Michael.”

Michael was at the top of the list to replace Aziraphale, should anything go wrong with Aziraphale’s reports. Aziraphale had bemoaned this on a number of occasions. 

“Michael’s a wanker!” Crowley shouted.

Aziraphale didn’t fight him very hard on that.

Crowley stopped at the corner of the next building, looking around the edge. Dry paint crumbled at his hand. The dust of it burned. They were standing next to one of Constantinople’s famed churches. Crowley shook it off.

They’d made it back to the busy marketplace. His eyes darted around for a possible easy solution to their massive problem, but Aziraphale couldn’t seem to care less.

“Why aren’t you worried?” Crowley demanded, glaring back at him. His eyebrow twinged. 

“Well, I hardly think they’re going to find me here.”

“You must be joking. All that goodness coming off of you? It’s like a fucking beacon.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, but Crowley caught the scent of brimstone once more and shoved Aziraphale back further into the shadowed alleyway. Little inconveniences spiked nearby: guilt, guilt, irritation, irritation, guilt, irritation…. What was the visiting moron doing? Tripping people as they went?

Half-frantic, Crowley gritted his teeth and peered around the corner again, gaze darting between crowds of shoppers and street vendors. He didn’t see anyone recognizable, but sometimes that was part of an earthly disguise. He reached back into the alley and snagged Aziraphale’s arm. 

“Come, come on.”

“Crowley—”

Crowley spotted salvation in the form of an unassuming, small green tent in a line of others, just across the way. Quickly, Crowley guided Aziraphale though the market, keeping his head up and alert, and threw open the canvas, shoving the angel inside. He snapped his fingers and three sides of the open tent patched themselves closed. There was nothing inside but a bare table for the wares of its missing vendor. 

Dimmer without the hot sun beating down as it did outside, Crowley breathed out but didn’t relax. His shoulders stayed tight and his neck cricked in an odd way as he strained to listen or feel for any demonic presence outside the tent, anything telling besides the casual meander of city citizens. His hair brushed the ceiling of the tent. Figures that he would feel compelled to pick the shortest, smallest tent. Behind him, Aziraphale dusted himself off like Crowley had ruined his attire completely.

Aziraphale looked down at the splash of red wine on his clothes. His mouth was a pointed little frown. Then he looked beseechingly up at Crowley.

Crowley pulled back from his sentry post and made a _shoo_ gesture. The wine disappeared from Aziraphale’s chest. “Better?” he asked quietly.

“Much.” Aziraphale smiled, dimples appearing. He cleared his throat and set down the jug that Crowley had forced into his hands at the taverna on the absent artisan’s empty table. “How did you know?”

“What?”

“That someone from Below would feel me here. How did you know?” Aziraphale whispered fervently.

Crowley rolled his eyes, turning to peer out the open corner of the tent again. The heavy scent of saffron and cumin was wafting from a stall somewhere down the line. Crowley stuck out the tip of his tongue to check. Hm. Bit up the street. Perhaps he would pay a visit if disaster was avoided. His snake eyes shifted up and down the centre walk, tracking the beautiful patterns in brick-laying. 

Coming up with the bright saffron was the rancid smell of something dark, something straight from the bowels of Hell.

There was only one thing in the quite-more-than-nine-circles of Hell that sucked all the air from the world and replaced it with suffocating tar (this was metaphorical on Earth, literal in Hell).

Hastur. Demon with enough juice and influence to get Crowley knocked down a few pegs in terms of clerical work should it be discovered that Crowley wasn’t doing as much as he reported. That would mean a permanent trip back to cubicles and mouldy paperwork in Hell, and sprinkle into that a few nasty hounds that went around biting people’s legs off. 

Had to be Constantinople, didn’t it? Hastur could’ve gone anywhere else in the world, but he chose the one place humanity had perfected. Crowley grit his teeth until his jaw ached. He was going to get an earful for Constantinople. Leave it to Hell to see only the good, and never the prospering bad!

Crowley pulled the curtains shut, mind spinning. There had to be a solution, something that he could do to decrease his and Aziraphale’s chances of being noticed. Hastur didn’t know where Crowley was. Crowley wasn’t doing anything bad enough to be detected now - well, was holding an angel in a tent against his will bad enough? It was for a good reason, it couldn’t be that bad. Intentions mattered _some_ , surely. Crowley flapped a hand to Aziraphale. “I’m sure any demon from a hundred miles around could feel _that_.”

“But - but—”

“But what?”

“But I thought you didn’t feel good things.” 

Crowley balked. Aziraphale’s mouth popped open and his brows shot up. 

“Stop talking, you’re ruining my concentration,” Crowley said.

Crowley shot out a hand in one direction and snapped, drawing familiar power up from Hell. A potted fern beside their tent caught ablaze, scattering a few nervous goats. He snapped again, and the next tent in the market line caught fire. Someone screamed, and humans rushed from the square. 

If he couldn’t do enough _good_ to cover up Aziraphale and himself, it was integral he do what he was best at. Little bit of fire never hurt anyone - best to draw Hastur’s attention to somewhere that they weren’t. 

Aziraphale gasped. “Why would you _do_ that!”

He made for the half-open side of the tent to rectify the situation, but Crowley snagged Aziraphale by the hem of his robe. Crowley jerked him back. Aziraphale paused, irritated and caught out. 

“It’s empty,” Crowley hissed, releasing him. He stood between Aziraphale and the open corner. “And someone’s got to cover up that terrible goodness coming out of you. It’s a distraction, it won’t hurt anyone.”

Offended, Aziraphale touched his chest. Mercy, it was like a beacon of pure, hateful white and holy warmth, as if the angel could mask it. As if Crowley could hope to! Crowley waved a hand in front of his face to clear the hot holy air. 

“You lot might not be able to conjure holy water with a flick of your hand, but demons are filled with hellfire.” To prove his point, Crowley snapped a spark of it into existence on his fingers, fizzling red and lighting up the shadows in Aziraphale’s expression. It faded after a half-second, leaving a flash of grey smoke in the air between them. 

Strangely, no semblance of fear hit Crowley in the resounding silence. 

Instead, Aziraphale scoffed. “Please,” he said.

Crowley’s eyebrows peaked high above the rims of his glasses. “What!” He leaned forward, trying to remember to whisper. Aziraphale didn’t budge. “Why aren’t you frightened!”

Holding his ground, Aziraphale began haughtily, “You’ve just shoved me into the smallest tent _I’ve ever been in—_ ”

“Well, sorry I couldn’t manage a _bigger tent—_ ”

“—in order to _avoid_ me getting killed - am I honestly expected to believe that you would murder me after trying to prevent your superior from doing exactly so?” 

Having Aziraphale figure that out was a very dangerous thing. Crowley had barely gained any ground on the idea of them working together, and now Aziraphale was heading straight on the path to discover him! Crowley tried not to swallow and look frightened himself. “Wh— you— eugh—!”

Aziraphale fixed the winged brooch on his coat, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Crowley.”

“Oh, _I’m,_ no, _I’m_ being ridiculous. Me, it’s me, _I’m_ being ridiculous, of course, of course.”

A hand pushed into his arm; Aziraphale made to shove past Crowley. Crowley bared his teeth, gripping Aziraphale by the wrist and holding him there. Aziraphale tried to jolt his arm free, his skin bare and warm like the sun. Crowley’s grasp tightened. 

“Let go!” 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Crowley hissed as Aziraphale tried pulling away again. 

“I’m going to put out the fire! It could spread!”

“It won’t spread! Just don’t think about it spreading and it won’t spread!” Hell, that was the simplest rule in performing miracles by will! What on Earth did Aziraphale think he was doing?

“It will certainly spread to something!” With surprising, sudden strength, Aziraphale threw off Crowley’s grip. Crowley balled his hand into a fist, beginning to seethe. Damn it all! 

“If you go out, he’ll see you! You’ll get us both into trouble. You, deadly trouble, me, the torture-for-a-century sort of trouble! Hell doesn’t have fun warnings, Hell sends Hastur!”

Aziraphale stopped at the curtain, hand elegantly poised to pull it open. He turned his face to one side, lending Crowley a view of his troubled expression as he listened. Crowley had him. Worried about that body, and all the trouble Heaven might kick up if it received so much as a scratch, was he? Worried about more than any simple discorporation? Admittedly, Crowley was. For the both of them.

Gently and quietly, like he could make up for his earlier shouting, Crowley pressed, “If I promise, _promise,_ that it won’t light up anything else, will you stay here?” He swallowed, showing his palms in a sign of patience. “I’ll even leave. You won’t have to share a tent with a demon. Wouldn’t want to force that on you.”

Aziraphale glanced to the curtain and back to Crowley. Shadows from orange light flickered outside the canvas. A demon’s promise was worthless, but Aziraphale looked at Crowley as though he were beginning to believe him.

“That body’s nearly six thousand years old,” Crowley went on. “You’ve never lost it once. You don’t want to give Gabriel any more of a reason to reprimand you, do you?”

“Don’t try and manipulate me,” Aziraphale commanded. Still, his hand rested on the curtain. “You don’t do it well.”

_Snappy today, aren’t you?_ Crowley frowned.

Aziraphale sighed. Finally, he removed that testy hand from the tent. 

Crowley relaxed. “There,” he said. “Now, let’s just… wait it out.”

“Wait out a fire?”

“Wait out Hastur. The fire won’t spread, I’m stopping it now,” Crowley said, snapping his fingers to quell the fire. Making sure Aziraphale wasn’t possessed by the need to leave again, he stepped to the empty table and picked up the decorated pitcher of wine. “That ought to distract him from you long enough. Let’s sit and have another drink.”

Two ceramic cups, one white and one black, appeared on the table. Crowley poured an extra serving into the white cup. 

“I didn’t know it was Hastur. Oh, we stole that. You took it from that taverna,” Aziraphale said, with concern etching his voice. 

“I did pay for it.” Crowley peered into the pitcher skeptically. “The wine inside, at least.”

Aziraphale took a last look towards the curtain, then turned to Crowley and took the cup he offered. Crowley sat down with the pitcher, crossing his legs and picking at the etchings in the glazework. Aziraphale lingered for a heartbeat, shifting his weight anxiously from foot to foot, then took a seat across from Crowley. 

Aziraphale said, “Crowley, what is Hastur doing here? Why Hastur?”

“Beats me. He had to pick the only thriving place in the world to show, though.”

“Well, that’s just it. I’ve just been thinking.” _What, in the last two minutes?_ “Is he here to ruin it? Is he here to do some harm? Is he--” Aziraphale broke off, his ring tapped against the cup. His light brows furrowed, and Crowley was staring fondly at the creases they made in his forehead when Aziraphale continued, “Is that what _you’re_ doing here?”

Surprised, Crowley nearly lost his grip on the pitcher. “What?” 

“Are you here to tempt someone?”

“No,” Crowley answered. 

“Then why are you here?”

“Why are _you_ here?”

“I don’t know if I should say.”

Crowley threw up his hands, forgetting about the cup. It went soaring and landed somewhere behind him, rattling on the bricks. “If you’re not going to tell me anything, I don’t know why we’re sitting in this forsaken tent.”

“You’re the one avoiding the question.”

Satan, this angel needed absolutely everything spelled out for him. Crowley struck the dusty ground with the point of one finger. “I am not here to tempt anyone - I wasn’t even _sent_ here. This is pleasure, not business. They don’t tell me what to do half the time. I’m here because I wanted to be, because it’s cleaner and warmer than the rest of human civilization combined.”

“What sort of pleasure?”

“I’m a demon, I’m allowed to indulge in all things,” Crowley said, and didn’t mean it. 

Aziraphale thought and then set down his cup between them. “If you don’t have a job to do here, perhaps Hastur does? Or perhaps they’ve sent him to find you for something.”

“I don’t tend to make meeting with Hastur and I haven’t done anything wrong enough to merit a visit.”

Aziraphale swallowed, looking guilty. Crowley had not done anything wrong except keep company with an angel of the Lord; Aziraphale’s contrite look made a good argument. 

No, there was no possibility that they’d been discovered. It had hardly been a century of cooperation and they never discussed trading their work in public, or at least not in earshot of anyone. Crowley’s eyes always scanned the room before he ever invited the angel for drinks. They kept company, like this afternoon, but nobody of importance had been around to see. Nobody before today.

“No, they don’t know.” Crowley shook his head, swirling the possibility around. “I’m sure Hastur is here on break just looking for… puppies to kick.”

A snort. Crowley glanced up. Aziraphale was covering half his face, and trying to laugh quietly. Crowley’s ears grew hot.

“Oh, that’s awful,” Aziraphale snorted. He laughed. “Puppies to kick.”

Crowley laughed back at him. 

After another handful of hours, after the sun had gone down and the pitcher of wine had been emptied and refilled and subsequently emptied a few more times, Crowley peeked outside of the tent curtain. No one was in the market anymore, and small lanterns in a few window sills above were casting short, weak shadows on the buildings below. The stars were bright, shining behind faint wisps of clouds, and the full moon cast a soft glow onto the city. 

Crowley swallowed, mentally reaching out. There was no niggling, annoying feeling of Hastur or any other demon within the walls of Constantinople. He relayed this to Aziraphale, and they sobered up.

Crowley smacked his tongue, eyeballs pounding so hard that it was difficult to remain standing as they exited the tent. The temperature had cooled, and now he found himself craving a warm spot to rest his head, where he could forget about the nearly-disastrous events of today. 

“Constantinople’s stuff packs a lot in one pitcher.”

Aziraphale dusted off his chiton, looking bleary-eyed for damage from the fire in the dark. “It was quite a bit more than one pitcher, my dear.”

“Was it?”

“Oh, how late do you think it is? I was supposed to meet with a human at sundown about some security nonsense. Did you hear about the Empire?”

Crowley stuck a finger in his ear and twisted it, trying to speed up the recovery of his hearing. “No. Go,” he said, “I’m sure your human is waiting on you.”

Nervously, Aziraphale asked, “Are you sure?”

“There’s nobody here anymore. Human or otherwise, I told you.”

“No, I meant… Well. Alright. I’ll see you shortly, I’m sure. We’ll have much to discuss after Constantinople is finished.”

Crowley tilted his head, watching Aziraphale walk all the way down the road, until he couldn’t see him anymore, for the buildings and the roads and the night had swallowed him up. 

Why hadn’t he simply let Aziraphale get caught? Was it really a matter of convenience, like he’d told Aziraphale? Crowley did get to feeling lazy sometimes, and Aziraphale was there to pick up the slack, but Crowley also did his job occasionally, and even enjoyed it sometimes. Crowley wasn’t good. But a bad person didn’t save angels. 

For the first time, Crowley began to wonder. If he couldn’t feel any Love from others, perhaps he was somehow manufacturing his own. 

His black heart _tha-thump_ ed.


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If he were tempted to, his fingertips could graze Aziraphale's hair, and wasn’t it inconvenient to be halfway in love?

_1376 CE. Rome, Italy._

The blackened beast had been following him through the wood for the better part of an hour.

Perhaps it thought Crowley to be stupid. The cat slunk through the shadows of trees, nothing more than a shadow itself, cast along the thinning grass that grew beneath the shade of old pines.

Something about it reeked of malice and despair. Helplessness. Self-hatred. It gave him a migraine that pounded behind his eyes. Crowley could’ve figured it to be some beast from Hell, but it was not accompanied by any demon that Crowley knew. It wasn’t a disguised hellhound because there wasn’t any lasting smell of fire or ironwood.

It was just that. A cat. Made of shadows and terribly dark feelings. Its eyes were white holes in its head, claws little half-moons that pricked the ground it pretended to stand upon. It had no fur to speak of, just a simmering dark pelt created from night. 

As the afternoon grew longer, and Crowley decided he had nothing better to do, he finally sighed theatrically and turned. He settled his hands on his hips, squinting suspiciously. “What do you want?”

The beast of a cat dipped behind an evergreen, skin ever-shifting. 

“I can see you. I’ve seen you the whole time. Come out, or I’ll throw whatever sent you back to Hell,” Crowley said. 

The cat peered out from behind the tree trunk. One black ear pricked, and the white eyes stared unblinking at Crowley.

Alright. Not a cat. Damn. Now Crowley was interested. Cat-shaped things always managed to find the one creature in a hundred-miles radius that was _not_ a cat person. It was an extremely annoying gift that had been granted to them, and Crowley made a mental note to ask Aziraphale who had been in charge of giving cats their cat-like behavior. 

The afternoon involved Crowley tracking the strange cat back through the wood, the way he’d already come. He followed it under fallen logs, over hillocks made of stone, and around a weird circle of shrines in the middle of a wayward cornfield that the local people had made to appease whatever they believed lived in these woods. When a pine tried to fall in their path, Crowley hissed at it and it peeled back, trembling. The cat doubled back several times, and Crowley snapped at it to go the right way, but the cat was outwardly unbothered by the demon’s frustration, twitching an ear and decidedly not listening to him. 

“You remind me of a friend,” said Crowley, picking his way through the forest floor. The dense trees off the beaten dirt path held shadows, but none were as dangerous as Crowley’s. “He doesn’t say much when he’s disappointed in me, either.” 

The sound of whitewater reached Crowley’s ears after an hour of light hiking. Where were they? He squinted, unable to see quite what lay beyond the last line of trees. He removed his glasses and cleaned them on his black coat, then replaced them over his nose. There was the sound of a river rushing past the trees. 

“Where’d you lead us to?” Crowley asked the cat. It settled by his shoes, white eyes turned up to Crowley’s with its cosmic tail tucked neatly at its side, still not looking like any earthly cat that Crowley had ever seen. Satan, it felt like something boiled under Crowley’s skin when that thing came too close to him, but right now it felt more intense than before. 

Crowley rolled his eyes, hunching his shoulders against the afternoon air. It’d become a tad brisk during their walk, and as Crowley looked through the pines, a body of water glittered in the sunlight. 

“Ah. A river. _Very clever of you_ , that’s what I would say if it _was_ clever of you. I don’t swim, and I don’t think you touch things at all. Do you want me to drown you?”

The cat peered up at him as much as it could with no eyes.

Crowley glared back, not much for typical felines; he didn’t feel a great kinship with their kind. Again, this was not an earthly cat, but neither did it appear ethereal or infernal. 

“Fine.” Crowley left the cat behind and pushed past the last line of pine trees. 

There was a girl sitting on the rocks beside the river, her back to Crowley and the forest. Snowmelt from the Italian mountains and the warmth of spring had made this water high and angry, and it rushed over the rocks before him, pounding into the eroding riverbed. 

As he watched, the human girl, dressed in the drapery of Rome, hopped off the rocks she sat on and approached the edge of the river. Her dark hair was done up with ornate golden pins that sparkled in the light.

Crowley glanced behind him, seeking the cat. It was gone, but strangely, the deeply sad and black feelings remained. He looked back to the girl, squinting behind his glasses, mentally connecting the dots. Ah, now he understood. She was the real source.

Crowley called out, “You can’t swim!”

The human girl whirled around in surprise. She placed a hand over her chest, and Crowley noted that while she was young and new, the twitch of her heartsickness needled into Crowley’s skin like that of a much older human.

“My, you frightened me,” she said to Crowley in Italian, eyeing Crowley’s approach. “Pray, what are you doing so far from any city?”

He was going to frighten this poor girl more. Sighing, Crowley cleared his throat and attempted to channel Aziraphale’s manner. Where was the damned angel when Crowley needed him? “Be calm, I haven’t meant to startle you. I saw you by the river’s edge from my walk in the woods and grew concerned.”

The girl nodded, a black curl framing one small ear. “I was taking water back to my village up the hill.”

“Then where are your pails?” Crowley asked.

She turned her face away, seemingly drawn to the river, which muffled their exchange in white noise.

“You can’t swim,” repeated Crowley in a quiet voice. God, why were so many humans incapable of swimming? Crowley found himself longing for the tropical islands near Southern Asia and all the humans there instead. “The river is too high today. I would try next week when all the snow has melted.”

The truth was he really was very unequipped to deal with anyone having a hard time right now, he was busy having his own hard times. (Aziraphale had ignored four of his recent letters to meet.)

Crowley slumped to the ground, wet moss from the foam the river tossed up perforating his thin clothes. He kicked his heels into the soft streambed and let the mist from the river splash up against bare feet, and then he tucked his arms under his head and focused on the spring breeze. 

“Pardon,” said the girl from above him, “but what are you doing?”

“I’m sitting until you feel better. Don’t think I’ve never seen anyone thinking of drowning themselves before.” Her pain wasn’t one that could be ebbed with Crowley’s help alone, and he didn’t wish to minimize it, but he’d found in the past that company often helped.

“So you know why I am here.”

“Yes. It’s a very stupid idea.”

“You don’t have a kind word for me?”

Crowley scowled and tipped his chin up - she was making him lose the last of the daylight, and he’d hoped to have been in the city by now. He took a deep, calming breath and grounded himself in the moment. Why was he put on Earth? _Talk to humans_ , that was what for. He might’ve gotten Eve in trouble, yes, fine, but that was thousands of years ago and technically he was still following every given order by being where he was. “No, I don’t.”

“You don’t have anything to say?”

“Well, _you_ clearly do.”

Taken aback, the girl managed, “What?”

“I’m guessing you wouldn’t still be sitting here if you wanted to drown. You don’t want to do that, really, I’ve drowned before. If you fight it, it hurts, and you’re a fighter.”

“I am no fighter,” said the girl. While Crowley listened, she explained briefly that her husband was a great thinker. For him to have the time to think, however, she was required to be dutiful to every household need. Below the surface of the girl’s brisk words, Crowley felt that same black frustration overtake him until it was difficult to swallow. 

She didn’t want to drown as it turned out, but she was willing to risk it to quickly escape from Rome. The last tie she had to the city was her younger sister, who she feared would be married next year, much the same as herself. 

There were several paths he could take. First, he could snap his fingers and move them back to Rome. That didn’t solve her problems, though, the truth was that she would return to the raging river. A second solution was to miracle away any black feelings from her very mind. However, like his first idea, the root problems would result in their return. Crowley could not be benevolent outright. He’d have to come up with a contrived way, if he wanted to be of assistance and be on his way. 

A streak of his own irritation caught him unexpectedly. What was he thinking? There was no reason he needed to help. It was typical of the city to treat their women this way, with disregard of their innumerable necessary services let alone their humanity. Hell loved stripping humans of every joy they held. 

“You’re after a very permanent solution, aren’t you? You could run instead of swim.”  
After a pause, the human girl sat on the moss as well.

“Would you like to be a fighter?” he asked. “Because I know of a battle of wits that’s to happen in France - win that and you’ll be rich enough to return to Rome for your sister…” 

As the sun sank down, Crowley leapt to his feet and plotted the girl’s escape with wild movements. With each description of what route or road she was meant to take, the black mood in the air rose higher until it lifted from his shoulders and he could see clearly. He didn’t miracle a thing: the girl wanted to go, and listened raptly to his every detail.

“You will follow this ridge and head straight towards the high mountains in the distance, it’ll be a very easy journey, I assure you. Take my travelling gear,” he said, snapping his fingers. At the bend in the rushing river beside them, a traveller’s pack appeared. Crowley offered to help her shoulder it, but she proved more than capable. “I would go fast, if I were you.”

“Will it be dangerous?”

“You won’t cross the river. Head into the forest and follow the setting sun.”

“Will it be dangerous?” she asked again.

Crowley smiled. “Only as dangerous as you wish it.”

She didn’t ask him to clarify. When she was out of sight, picking her way through the woods, Crowley snapped his fingers and made the pack’s weight lessen. There would be no opposition to her journey from man or beast (or tree, if Crowley had anything to say about it), and Crowley consoled himself by thinking over what had just transpired.

He turned to the Italian mountains, points blue and snow-tipped. The girl’s win in France’s tournament would upset the brackets and other competitors, and it would definitely lead to anger and frustration on the behalf of the audiences. She would win, of course, and be unharmed, Crowley didn’t need to meddle with that. From their short conversation, he was aware that she was very clever indeed, and didn’t need to be subservient to a man who thought, but never about her… 

A twig crackled behind him.

“Crowley?”

Crowley whirled, fumbling to the ground in shock, a stick of rotten driftwood wedging itself under his arm painfully. “Gah! What are you doing here?”

Aziraphale frowned down at Crowley, serenely foldings his hands at his chest. “Well! I was taking care of the shrines. You didn’t tell me you were in Italy,” he said. 

He hadn’t been paying much attention the last decade or so, and the borders in the east were changing much too fast for his liking, not to mention too fast for anyone to reasonably keep up with. “I didn’t mean to be! There was - there was this cat, you see, but it really wasn’t a cat, it was just bad feelings, so— oh, I suppose you wouldn’t have seen it, and then there was—”

Aziraphale straightened. “The girl. I know. I saw her.”

What else had Aziraphale seen? Crowley set his jaw. How dare Aziraphale sneak up on him, and how dare he not tell Crowley he was in this hemisphere before this moment? They were supposed to coordinate! Crowley was supposed to know where Aziraphale was so that they would never find themselves in these situations. 

In a tone more serious than he’d taken with Aziraphale than ever before, Crowley said, “You can’t breathe a word, Aziraphale.”

“I wouldn’t. I know the punishment—”

“I had to,” Crowley began to explain in a rush, “she was meant for your side, and I couldn’t let that happen. Do you— do you think Hell gives out promotions based on who sends people to Heaven? To people who _let_ humans go to Heaven? No, thank you, that’s what they say. Giving her more time means there’s more time for her to do wrong. I’m not in danger of any _punishment_ \- I was _doing_ my job.”

Aziraphale’s gaze lingered in the direction the girl had gone, fingers tapping tediously against each other. Ah. He must’ve seen her, he must’ve seen Crowley do _that._ Aziraphale assumed the same awkward, ramrod posture he had on the Garden wall, breaking the stance only to adjust the flowing drapes of his robes. Crowley turned away, bracing himself for an explanation as to why he should never have spoken to the girl, staring at the river running over the rocks.

“I won’t breathe a word. Say what you need to say. Sometimes,” Aziraphale said after a moment, “I think it might be easier if we both felt the whole of it.”

Crowley didn’t interject, but his lips parted in surprise. 

Aziraphale went on, “I don’t… know if I would _want_ to feel such bad things from others. But I don’t think you should be limited to it.”

Crowley fought for his words. Most of it was garbled junk, but then he managed some real prose. “Some of— it, it’s nice.”

Aziraphale sighed. “I suppose you would think so—”

“No, no,” corrected Crowley softly, pushing himself upright. All the wind had gone out of him. “Not because I’m a demon. I don’t think the… evil things are nice.” He wasn’t very interested in the evil, sad feelings anymore. 

He cast a curious glance over his shoulder, waiting for someone from Hell to show up at precisely the wrong moment. He turned his face down and away, shutting his eyes in a flash of frustration - he couldn’t confide in Aziraphale. It wasn’t a lack of trust, he realized abruptly, it was the fact that Hell could be watching them at this very moment, as unlikely as that seemed. Heaven could be watching him, too, and word would get back to his employers. 

Crowley faced Aziraphale, “Just. Occasionally. It’s nice to know when someone is having a bad day.”

Aziraphale’s eyes sparkled with recognition.

“Then I know who _not_ to tempt.” Crowley shrugged. He sniffed, as if uninterested, and pushed up from the grass and assumed his usual posture. “Anyway. Don’t know if I’d go in for all that good stuff.”

“Well. Then I’ll continue to tell you about it.” Aziraphale gently nodded upriver, where the girl had disappeared. His voice caught, making Crowley flinch, and Aziraphale rectified it a moment later. “I grew concerned when I first saw you two. I couldn’t feel anything from her… and I can always feel _something._ But then she… bloomed. You’ve made her very happy.”

Happy. 

In his mind, Crowley reached for it desperately. He didn’t let it show on the outside, but on the inside, he was feverish. At last, with all this time, perhaps he would be able to feel the sense of yellow joy, of enrapture, of blasting Love. Perhaps a tinge of thankfulness. If he’d created it, partially or by proxy, maybe he was entitled to graze it.

He didn’t feel a smidgen of _happiness_ in the wood or in the mountains. But neither did he feel the oppressing black of earlier. The cat had gone away; something in the wind had changed and the clouds had left.

Seeming to see behind Crowley’s glasses, Aziraphale beamed. 

It was the sort of smile that told Crowley, _you’ve done a very good job_. It crinkled his eyes and gave him those big great dimples. It seemed as though Aziraphale was _proud._ Crowley had to say, he liked seeing that smile from Aziraphale more than he liked seeing it from any number of demonic board meetings. 

And it was suddenly alright that Crowley didn’t feel the girl’s happiness.

Behind him, the river bubbled over the rocks. 

-/-  
 _1613 CE. London, England._

“Aren’t you upset?” asked Crowley softly. 

There was a great pain in London tonight, and it wasn't Crowley's doing. It wasn't physical, either, like he was accustomed to. He had seen the flames tinge the evening sky orange across the city, heard people shouting, sensed the unease in floodwaves. 

He'd thought the city was on fire. How did it start? When would it stop? Like so many places and cities before, London was ablaze, it had to be, and there wasn't anything Crowley could do to stop it. But there wasn't any fear of bodily harm coloring the night, no overwhelming distress that accompanied homes and families burning. There was an awful prickling to Crowley's skin, but no lush, hot count of death. There was loss, but no death. 

Crowley swept his blackcoat over his shoulders, striking out from his gambler's den and into the empty, dark streets.

The first hateful thing to pop into his head had been, _where is Aziraphale_?

Like usual, the bastard was lingering around the messiest spot, a bystander to the burning theatre, when Crowley finally caught up with him.

“A bit,” admitted Aziraphale, an understatement. He straightened. “But they’ll rebuild. They always do.”

Aziraphale held his hands before him, rubbing a finger over his palm again and again. His lips were parted, white and gold clothing tinged with specks of ash and grey soot. He'd been standing here awhile. Perhaps from the moment the Globe caught fire. _Stray cannonfire, botched effects, special production,_ claimed the thinning crowd of onlookers. The worst of the fire was hours past. Now it smoldered, spitting and angry, like the feelings of the humans watching it. 

Crowley remembered the fallen towns Aziraphale and him had seen together. He remembered the ones he’d seen alone. Husks of cities, set alight by warring nation-states. All that fear and struggling with everywhere to go. Try as he might, Crowley could not remember why he felt so much better when Aziraphale was there to validate his concerns.

He cast one single glance around them, finding no familiar faces, and his tension ebbed while curls of woodsmoke floated into the air from the remains of the theatre. 

“But it won’t be the same," said Crowley.

“Nothing’s ever the same with people. They rebuild, even if the outcome is different.”

“Won’t you miss it?”

Aziraphale teetered on the edge of a confession. His eyes slid the Crowley, staring, and away. “The Globe was a great theatre. People will remember it.”

“Not if it burnt down.”

“Think of Southwark. Or Rome. Or,” Aziraphale’s breath hitched, “Alexandria.” He touched his cheek, eyes focused on a faraway point. Crowley’s chest hurt, mimicking the tightness of Aziraphale's voice. How much of a miracle would it take to remake it exactly the same as it had been? Would Hell notice his snap of power, could he claim it as a show of force? Aziraphale shook his head. “They all burnt down. And see, London is still here.”

“I didn’t ask about any of those places,” said Crowley. “I didn’t ask if the Globe was a great theatre, or where lovely sunbathing spots are, or what’s the best place to eat lunch. I asked if you’d miss it.”

Aziraphale stopped. “I will.”

Crowley nodded, turning away and seeking a passerby. Members of the acting troupe, still adorned in Henry VIII costumes, stood awkwardly several lengths away, picking through the smoldering rubble.

“Oi!” he shouted. A few members looked to him. Crowley gestured across the river. “Don’t you think you’ve gone and built on the wrong side of the Thames?”

Katherine of Aragon looked bewildered, and the actor straightened, calling his counterparts over. Belatedly, Crowley noticed Aziraphale setting a wondrous hand over his heart. 

Crowley said, “I say, why don’t you try the other side?” 

When the crowd dispersed some time later, Aziraphale’s hand fluttered to Crowley’s elbow. Crowley let him take it, and they began to wander from the site, arm-in-arm. 

The distress leaked away from Aziraphale, and there was Crowley's prize in its wake - that blissful quiet, rolling off of him like hills on a grassy plain. No bad things for Crowley to feel. Crowley was most at ease when Aziraphale was relaxed and nothing bad poured from him.

“You’ve no idea what you’ve done,” Aziraphale said with a pink smile. 

“I’ve just given the Rose more competition. Demonic.” Crowley grinned. 

The Rose Theatre had been torn down in 1606. If Aziraphale knew, he didn’t mention it.

“You’ve given the troupe hope. Oh, they looked so distraught. I didn’t know where to begin to help.”

“Listen, I didn’t help. I told you. It was very selfish of me.” 

Aziraphale patted Crowley’s wrist. “Of course,” he said, and it didn’t sound like he understood at all. 

-/-

_1838 CE. A Train to London, England._

It became apparent that Aziraphale was staying in England for the foreseeable future. He’d opened up a shop with a loft flat, a backroom, and a desk. Wall to wall, lined with books. 

Carefully-tended covers, unwrinkled pages, forever-white paper and bold-black ink. It smelled dusty and ill-used, despite the fact that it had only been opened thirty-eight years ago. Plush tartan armchairs and a stout sofa, printed paper on the walls, a skylight and a few thick Persian rugs. The atmosphere eminded Crowley of ancient libraries as much as old castles. 

Best of all, rarely anyone ever came in. 

Crowley did what he had to do. Namely, he got a flat in the same city. He wasn't there very often, and he didn't let Aziraphale know that the flat existed, but he had the strangest feeling that Aziraphale knew about it anyway. 

This evening, they were taking humanity’s newest invention across England back towards London, having been in Glasgow on business. Petrach’s _Letter to Posterity_ sat unfolded on a table between them, black Latin spilling across the handwritten pages, accompanied by a number of other volumes. 

Presently, Aziraphale adjusted his spectacles for what felt like the hundredth time in half as many minutes. Each time, Crowley was subjected to the utter horror of watching Aziraphale’s practiced fingers tuck the temples behind his ear, fiddling with a shock-blond curl, only to have them slip down once again.

From across the train car, Crowley slouched in the cushions, arms crossed, glaring. His toes flexed angrily in his snakeskin boots, and he grumbled like the steam engine in back. 

How _dare_ Aziraphale sit there, utterly absorbed in his latest prophetic book (one containing total bullshit, like they all did), fixing his spectacles and looking completely content. For the world, it didn't seem he'd noticed anything amiss.

After making a few well-timed grunts and pointedly staring unblinking for half an hour, Crowley gained Aziraphale’s attention. 

The angel sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose _again_. The curl was brushed _again_ , and _again_ Crowley was left wondering how silk-soft it would feel underhand. 

“My dear, whatever is the matter?” 

“You don’t _need_ to wear glasses.”

Aziraphale blinked, bright hazel eyes surprised. Slowly, he smiled, fussing with the frames. “I think they’re nifty,” he said. 

Nifty. What a horrifyingly perfect way to put it. Of course Aziraphale liked them. They were silver, thin, tiny-round, and _nifty._

“Nifty,” Crowley repeated, astounded.

“Besides, _you_ don’t need to wear _your_ glasses.” Aziraphale flipped the page of his book, rustling the thick paper. “Personal choice.”

Crowley scoffed, mocking, “Angels aren’t supposed to make personal choices.”

Aziraphale studied a woodcut illustration. “Neither are demons.”

Shoving himself up from his seat, Crowley crossed the train car and slumped into place beside Aziraphale. Aziraphale kept reading sagely, unruffled. Crowley folded his arms and glared openly at Aziraphale’s soft profile. Aziraphale kept on reading, just as he had been before. 

A bout of silence passed. 

“You really think those books have something to them, don’t you?”

Aziraphale didn’t look up, but his shoulders shuddered with a repressed giggle. He brought his thumb up to his lip, touched it to his tongue, and turned the page. Crowley felt hot all the way down to the soles of his feet. “All books have something to them.”

Biting back a comment about historically inaccurate Bibles, Crowley leaned into the padding of the train booth, kicking out his feet and trying to look miserable. 

Aziraphale turned to the window and sighed, a hand propping up his chin. 

Outside, it was dim. The gentle green hillside rolled past, blurs of trees and shadows and mountains coalescing into space where humans were beginning to fill, where pockets of light were visible through the evening shadows. The trains had helped with expansion, but Crowley couldn’t say whether it was his side or Aziraphale’s that had helped them along. 

Crowley took interest. That look on Aziraphale’s face was one he’d seen a thousand times. God, it was everywhere, wasn’t it? Just earlier, at the station, when Aziraphale had watched a young father putter by with two children, or yesterday, when Aziraphale had received a meal so _brimming_ with Love from the chef that he could hardly eat it. Him!

He sniffed. Besides a lingering annoyance from the few other passengers somewhere down the next train car, there wasn’t any bitterness in the air. 

“What is it?” asked Crowley, while already knowing.

Aziraphale shook his head patiently, turning back to his book.

“You can’t just stare out a window and smile like that. Come on. What is it?”

“Do you really want to know?” Aziraphale peered over his glasses at Crowley.

“Wouldn’t have asked, otherwise.”

“It’s Love again, of course.”

Crowley nodded, “Course.” He paused. “Tell me what it feels like?”

Aziraphale told him. As he listened, Crowley felt a sense of warmth rise to his cheeks. Aziraphale explained it so tediously, noting every detail with a thoughtful nod, and Crowley knew he was hearing the truth, as best described as it could ever be.

Love had sunk into the Earth and settled at its core. It didn’t keep it running, Aziraphale had said long before tonight, but it did make the running worth it.

Crowley scrunched up his nose. _He_ had never had such power.

But then, who was there to love besides Her, at the time? When he had been capable of it?

His gaze slid to Aziraphale in the cabin, his shoulder now slumped on the window pane, book spilled open in his lap, feet primly crossed at the ankles. He looked to be nearly dozing, eyes half-lidded and weary, content smile crinkling his cheeks. He was warm at Crowley’s side, and the snake in Crowley longed to splay himself across Aziraphale’s wicked thighs and knock away the bound paper. 

Crowley shifted to stare daggers at the book. His brow furrowed. It had _better_ be an uplifting edition, or else. Aziraphale had best not be disappointed. He’d rip out the pages of any novel that dared try to wipe the timidly soft expression from Aziraphale’s face.

“Dear,” said Aziraphale, straightening and remembering his book. He pushed his silver spectacles up from where they’d slipped down the point of his nose yet again. Needn’t have bothered, Crowley could’ve done that for him. “Would you take a look at this?”

Leaning over conspiratorially, Aziraphale held up his book, pointing a manicured fingernail at a lone passage for Crowley’s benefit. 

Crowley’s eyes did not adjust properly to the fine handwritten pages, but he nodded in faked understanding all the same. Their shoulders nearly brushed, Crowley’s head cocked down to regard the unfocused lettering, Aziraphale taking all the breath in the carriage.

“What does it mean?” Crowley asked, staying unnaturally still.

Aziraphale looked at him strangely and then beamed, as if to say _it means exactly what is says, you ridiculous thing_. Crowley’s insides went wiggly and he sank deeper into the cushions, stretching his arm out over the back of Aziraphale’s seat in a phantom movement to bracket them together.

If he were tempted to, his fingertips could graze Aziraphale's hair, and wasn’t it inconvenient to be halfway in love?

-/-

_1941 CE. London, England._

“You got a car.”

Crowley paused, fingers on the passenger’s handle, and turned towards Aziraphale. Aziraphale stood a length away, breathless, still clutching his briefcase of books. The smell of gunpowder filled London, pushed around with every exhale. 

“Yes.” He frowned, turning the handle and opening the door for Aziraphale. He waited, lounging over the Bentley’s door, but Aziraphale didn’t take a step through the rubble of the church in any direction. A few flames flickered behind him, giving him a gauzy, glowing orange outline. “I’d thought that was rather obvious.”

“You got a car.”

“Bought it, actually. With human money.”

“You _bought_ a car,” Aziraphale repeated. 

What was so hard to grasp about Crowley buying a car? “Woke up for a short spell in 1926. It happened to be around and I happened to be feeling impulsive. Come along. Lift home.”

Aziraphale didn’t breathe a word.

Crowley soothed, “I can drive.”

Nothing. 

Crowley sighed, getting tired now. “Come on. It’s a fantastic car - I love it.”

“You _what?_ ”

“Let’s hit the road,” he patted the Bentley’s hood for emphasis, trying to subtly urge Aziraphale to quit standing around out in the open when he had a bag of priceless books in his grip. There could be Nazis watching, or demons. “I’ve got a funny feeling that there won’t be any more bombs over London tonight.”

Slowly, Aziraphale crossed the distance between the last of the rubble and where Crowley stood, stumbling over a block of wood. “I’m— I don’t—” he tried. With a bewildered stare, Aziraphale finally got in. 

Crowley closed the door for him. 

-/-

_1945 CE. Saint-Mihiel, France._

They wandered in the space where the humans had died.

Behind them were the war trenches they’d crossed, and more were still to go. Crowley could see them, some filled in with mud and dirt and poppies just over the next hillock. The countryside was grooved with shallow ditches where thin grass had begun to grow over. The field was dotted with husks of empty tankers. Loose boards stuck up, planted in the dirt, remnants of blown buildings that used to stand here.

War flattened everything. The French landscape, dozens of towns, millions of people. 

The atmosphere weighed heavy around two inhuman beings. Dying thoughts, hopelessness, and sour meat. Something curdled but sweet, like the scent of rotting fruit. 

Crowley blew a breath out his nose, trying to clear the air, but the feeling of impending death was so cloying that he was nauseous with it. How did humans stand it, not feeling these things in halves?

The air dried the back of Crowley’s mouth, cracked his lips, scratched his skin. It was alive with misfires and fallen soldiers. Everywhere he stepped, someone had been lying dead only months ago, artillery had shelled great holes in the landscape, and fires had broken out.

And all these things were gone now. Swept over, filled up. All that was left were bright red flowers and a rolling field and the decommissioned equipment that grass had yet to cover. It was a funny thing here - the predominant feeling was fear of being forgotten. 

Is that what humans worried about when they went off to war? Crowley felt ill. 

Beside him, with the gentle breeze tussling the white curls by his brow, Aziraphale cleared his throat. “You missed quite a lot, these past few years.” 

He looked crestfallen. Perhaps he was sensing one of the lapses that Crowley tried to seek out on his own time, lapses where the regular hurry of human life lulled. There couldn’t have been a lot of Love here. The places where Aziraphale _couldn’t_ feel Love probably made him quite sad. 

Crowley scoffed, focusing on settling his stomach. _Few_. Call a hundred years a few, why don’t you? Some trouble waking up and suddenly everyone was on your case.

“Don’t make me go on about why,” Crowley demanded.

They took a moment to stare out at the poppies. 

Aziraphale tugged on his waistcoat, straightening a wayward button. Today he was skittish. Crowley had offered to meet him back in London, at the bookshop, but Aziraphale had insisted he come to Crowley instead. _For business, strictly_ , he’d said. 

Curiously unhappy, Crowley had answered out of spite, _What else is there to discuss?_

Crowley hadn't been to the bookshop in years. He missed it. Aziraphale seemed to divert him these days, as if nervous that Crowley would knock over some antique or dislodge old newsprint. Half the reason Crowley had woken up at all was to go and lounge around in it when he didn’t have anything better to do. 

They hadn’t even gone driving in the Bentley since the war. 

"Told them I started this one," mused Crowley, crouching down to hold a bright flower in between his fingers. He tilted it, marveling over the yellow insides, and the petals reflected onto his skin in the sunlight, turning his thumb red.

"You also told them you began the Spanish Inquisition." Aziraphale glanced out to the expanse of the flowers blowing in the breeze. 

Drawing a deep breath, both the fragrant red poppies and old trench deaths filled Crowley’s senses. He closed his eyes hard and remembered how to function, standing up. He put a fist in one pocket, tilting the wide brim of his hat to cover the excess of light that his glasses couldn’t. 

Aziraphale went on, "I'm only glad it's over."

"They could start back up again. Lots of delays on signing a treaty. It could continue."

Aziraphale shuddered. 

"But it won't." Crowley cocked an eyebrow. “Feel something?”

“Loads,” answered Aziraphale, which wasn’t an answer at all. He turned in one direction, striding through the once-battlefield. 

Strange woes tickled the bottom of Crowley’s feet as he followed, grasping at his ankles like the eager tendrils of something hungry. He’d walked through paths of war before. Rarely were the effects so concentrated, so lethal. Many people, felled in one spot. New weapons, quick-firing guns, gases. 

What terrible things humans built for murdering each other. He couldn’t imagine why the sky was so blue and the clouds were so white when just a year before they had looked down on something so awful. 

“There were two wars fought in this town,” said Aziraphale, holding his hands in front of him, following some invisible line of feeling. What was there for an angel to feel here? There was no Love. 

Two wars. All these deaths, years apart, overlapping in pain and hurry, covering Crowley’s mind. Aziraphale sounded almost muffled from beneath the terror in the land. Crowley shook his head to clear it, dizzy from pollen and pain. 

“There were two wars fought all about Europe,” Crowley said. “That’s the point of calling them World Wars.”

“Yes, but they shared relatively few specific locations. Saint-Mihiel was liberated by Patton twice.” 

Crowley rolled his eyes. “That’s France, for you.” 

Both hands in his trouser pockets, Crowley followed Aziraphale to the short path that led down into a set of dry trenches. Soil had collapsed from one of the mounds of soil on top, and so flowers were growing even down here on the portions that received light, long stems supporting heavy red blossoms that were still reaching for the sky.

Crowley stopped at the top, looking down at Aziraphale. Oppressing terror wound around Crowley. Like the damp, it had settled low in these carved grooves of the land, stretching and whispering black. It felt like crimson, heavy and subtly searing. He shrugged it off, eyes settling on the angel. Couldn't leave him alone down there. Crowley hopped in.

Aziraphale crouched, pulling something long and metal from beneath a torn groundsheet. He stood, lifting it and revealing an old rifle to Crowley. A faulty trigger clicked under his hand. Clogged.

Edging closer, Crowley noticed a small etching into the butt of the gun. _E. G._ Hard lines in metal. It would’ve taken time and effort. Not a remarkable name, just some random soldier who had lost his life in the trenches when his rifle jammed. It happened all the time. Crowley knew that for certain, because he’d been on the board of creating weapon jams, so he felt a tad guilty right about now. Why had Aziraphale picked up the gun?

Running a delicate finger over the carvings to brush off the settled mud, Aziraphale turned the rifle in his grip, handling it like he was unsure of how to hold it. Figured, a swordsman like himself. “People put a lot of Love in their weapons during war.”

Ah. That explained it. Crowley nodded. _Go on,_ he was saying.

With a sideways glance to Crowley, Aziraphale sighed. “It’s… different than other sorts of Love. It’s not the same as what people feel for each other or the kind of Love that’s always on Earth; it’s different. It’s as though you magnified one part of Love, and put that into a weapon. It’s a savior sort of Love--”

“It isn’t Love. It’s fear. Weapon’s the only thing standing between them and death.” Crowley blew out a breath from between his clenched teeth. The air was too heavy. Did Aziraphale feel that? No, he couldn’t. He’d never know what it felt like. 

Aziraphale smiled, nodding his head to Crowley, who hadn’t expected an agreement. “My dear,” he said, “you can be fearful _and_ in love.”

Taken aback, Crowley snorted and bared his teeth in a sneer. “People don’t fall in love with their weapons. We weren’t talking about being _in love._ ”

Aziraphale’s expression turned nervous. He smiled anxiously, avoiding Crowley’s face, fiddling with the broken trigger again. “No, no. I suppose we weren’t. I misspoke.” 

Crowley didn’t want to be in the trenches anymore. He cleared his throat, but his voice still came out tight. “You can keep your guns. My side doesn’t even like them all that much.”

He tilted his head up to look for the best way out. His feet felt heavy - the bad kind of heavy, the one that came before Hell arrived to drag him under the Earth. It couldn’t have been, he knew rationally, but it still _felt_ like that. 

“I don’t even like them all that much,” said Aziraphale.

“Yeah? Neither do I. What a coincidence.” 

Crowley lifted a leg and jammed the toe of his boot into the wall of soil, pushing himself up and peering over the grassy edge into the field of red. 

His stomach turned over, and things began to spin. Shadows of soldiers and points of invisible rifles lurched across the battlefield, and it seemed as though the husks of tanks were starting to kick to life. He could hear the rumble of machinery and remember battling the enemy although he’d never set foot here before today. He clenched the grass hard, snapping poppy stems, and soft dirt crumbled in his hands. 

“Try the path, dear. Don’t start climbing. And. Besides,” Aziraphale went on, side-eyeing Crowley, “the good kind of Love is supposed to scare you.”

“Ssscare you?” Crowley turned his face down, stopping tightly. That didn’t sound right. Aziraphale had never seemed _scared_ by Love. Crowley’s head ached.

“Yes, Love is—” 

“I feel ill.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, I’ll stop—”

“No, I feel ill,” Crowley said certainly, clutching his stomach. He lost his grip and toppled to the bottom of the trench, collapsing to his hands and knees. Rocks and old pieces of equipment dug into his bones, but he was unable to think past the sudden inability to breathe. 

Almighty, it was worse down here. He gagged for fresh air, but each breath drew in only the hot scent of death. He shook violently, coughing, his limbs burning. 

Aziraphale dropped the rifle, coming to Crowley’s side. 

“What’s wrong? Did you touch something?” Aziraphale fretted, hanging onto Crowley’s shoulder. 

Vaguely aware that Aziraphale was glancing about the rubble in the trench for the culprit - a silver cross or a-somehow-forgotten tin of holy water - Crowley shook his head, and his sunglasses tilted off his face. 

“No, no… it’s the damn _death_ , God, I hate this place—!” Crowley broke off, wrenching with a new pain in his not-quite-lungs. His mind may have been adept at handling itself after all this time on Earth, but this body was unable to make sense of the sensations in such high concentration, and now his throat burned with bile. 

“Death?” said Aziraphale.

“It’s in the fucking air.” 

Aziraphale struggled for a moment, voice tight. “Out of the trench?”

Crowley spat a dark glob onto the ground, and Aziraphale made an involuntary sound in the back of his throat. “Out of the trench,” Crowley agreed helplessly. 

Aziraphale helped Crowley to his feet, the both of them unsteady with Crowley leaning heavily on Aziraphale, who was keeping them upright with surprising strength. Crowley’s head throbbed powerfully with the slight change in altitude, like a migraine he couldn’t miracle away. 

Sunlight hurt, Crowley discovered as Aziraphale helped him up the path and out of the trench. Sunlight hurt, yes, but the great clouds of pain dissipated. The air was still heavy out here but the air in the trenches had been heavier. 

Crowley bared his teeth, a low hiss forming deep in his aching chest as something within him urged the serpent to come out, to hide away this vulnerable human body. He felt like the fight had gone out of him, like it must have gone out of thousands of soldiers that had once stood where he did.

Like he’d climbed out of a swimming pool filled with tar, Crowley drew in deep breaths to keep his form, casting an uneasy glance back at the trench. Was that all it took to unnerve him and make him ill? Some fucking death, which he’d been around for thousands of years? 

What a moron Crowley was turning out to be this century. 

Aziraphale stepped back but kept near, and if Crowley thought about it too hard, he’d realize that this was the closest Aziraphale had been to him since he’d woken up from his nap a few years ago.

Crowley slowly moved to lie down on the ground, flat on his back. Aziraphale stood over him, beige hat in hand, looking down at him with concern. 

_Be careful, angel, or I might grow to think you care about me_. 

“Are you alright?”

“Peachy.” Crowley raised up a hand, summoning a new pair of black glasses identical to his old ones and replaced them over his nose. The sunlight dimmed and his headache began to subside, but now grew a slight embarrassment about having been less-than-perfect in front of Aziraphale for a few brief minutes.

“Are you certain? Your eyes are very yellow. I’ve - I’ve never seen you get quite so ill.”

“You’ve never seen me get ill.”

“Well, perhaps the occasional sickness the morning after drinks.”

Crowley’s tongue tasted horrible, but his senses were returning, and the poppies were bending around him in the cool wind. He’d never seen Aziraphale get ill, he thought.

“You’d think Love would be the thing to do me in,” Crowley said, too weak with illness to keep his usual distance from the subject of Love, “not the rubbish I’m meant to like.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, brows drawing together thoughtfully. Hands at his stomach twisting his signet ring, he turned his face towards the blue sky, as if tracking the clouds that rolled through. “One would think.”

Crowley coughed, gaining his haughty strength back in the next breath. He sat up at the waist, surveying what the land was like from down here. The flowers seemed much taller, and he didn’t have enough heart yet to tell them to stop looking at him so grudgingly.

Weary, he tilted his head back to peer up at Aziraphale. "Still not as bad as the Spanish Inquisition."

-/- 

_1967 CE. London, England._

Disappointment drenched the Bentley for years. It saturated the seats and soaked the dashboard, like someone had poured potent gasoline over leather. Scrubbing did no good. Neither did letting it sit and stew.

All there was to do was crank the windows and air out the regret.

-/-

_11 Years Ago. Tadfield Manor, England._

He thought there'd be more time. 

You always think there will be more time.

With the gear handle clutched in his hand, Crowley shifted up and floored the gas, his own panic flooding the car. In the backseat of the Bentley, an important basket moved. 

-/-

 _Six Years Before the End of the World. England._

There was a child absolutely wailing by the swimming pool at the neighboring estate. Big, fat shrieks, the kind that came from pavement-knee-scrapes. 

Crowley decided it was a learning opportunity. 

“Hear that?” She cooed to the toddler on her hip. Warlock plucked a string from the poufs of her shoulder pads. “That’s the most wonderful sound, and you can make it happen whenever you’d like. Music.”

"It doesn't sound like music. There's no singing."

"Singing takes away from the melody. The melody of pain. Oh, you'll come to love it. Trust me."

Reasonably, the child wouldn’t understand nor remember a thing Crowley was saying, Crowley knew. But that also meant that Warlock wouldn’t internalize any of the gardener’s spouting lessons, either. Last week, Crowley was certain she'd overheard Aziraphale once again giving a monologue about care and kindness, about caressing leaves gently because you never knew what they were thinking, and about stopping in appreciation of natural wonders.

Warlock hadn't been present. Aziraphale was talking to himself. Practicing, perhaps, or trying to convince himself of his character.

The morning breeze over the estate gentled, and Crowley and Warlock settled on the grass. Crowley sat on the checkered-black blanket while Warlock stretched out and picked blades of grass, deciding what he wanted to color today. Above them, a great oak provided deep shade, and the lilac bushes held tightly-curled purple flowers, scores of them days away from fragrant blooming.

It was occasionally difficult for Crowley to believe that the child she watched over would bring about the end of the world. Or not, hopefully. If all went according to plan. It wasn’t what she was supposed to be thinking, being a demon who should have, reasonably, wanted to win the war to end all wars, but she’d settled into it so gradually, she hardly knew when it began. 

It was noon before Aziraphale, in his full gardener's getup, emerged from the rosethorns nearby with his shears and approached Crowley and her keep.

The lilac flowers bloomed suddenly. Light purple blossoms overtook the rows of green leaves, glistening with bright dewdrops that should’ve been evaporated by the sun by now. Crowley frowned. 

"Hello, young master Warlock!"

Warlock peered past Crowley's arm, muttered something nonsensical, and seized his box of pencils. He lay flat on his stomach, feet kicking the ground, coloring intently.

Still partially surprised at the flower’s brazen behavior, Crowley pulled a few fresh shades of red from nowhere, and set them on the paper beside Warlock. Better for drawing blood than simple black and crimson, because artistry took no second hand to evil. She would have to have a strong word with those bushes after Warlock went to sleep.

Aziraphale smiled at the child despite a lack of response, with his silly big teeth. Crowley's chest kick-started itself, and she frowned. "Brother Francis. What are you doing here?"

"Tending to the garden, ma'am."

"Don't pretend you know how to garden. You can't carry around a set of shears all day and act like you know."

Aziraphale carefully sat on the blanket beside Crowley, leaving his shears on the short lawn. She had not invited him. He merely took it that he was welcome, which was false. He opened his palms, appearing like an old reasonable friar. "Same as _you_ can't carry around a child all day and act like you know how to raise it, ma'am."

There was that lovely, beautiful snark. No one got to see half the snark Crowley did. It was nothing compared to hers, of course, but Aziraphale was incredible at making his rudeness look polite. The formal address tacked on at the end of Aziraphale's comment made it no better. 

Crowley tried to glare down her nose. She glanced at Warlock, completely enthralled in drawing some red-haired monstrosity. "That had better be blood, young man."

"Yes, Nanny."

Crowley turned conspiratorially to Aziraphale, scowling. She spoke sharply and quietly, her hands folded in the lap of her tight skirt. "If you keep hanging around, he's going to get the idea that you're rude," she said, tilting her chin up in a challenge. 

"He'll get the idea that you're _not_ rude, if I keep hanging around." Aziraphale's eyes widened, a tempting trick. 

"That's the rudest thing you've ever said to me."

Aziraphale shrugged, looking at Crowley over his shoulder. "Well, there you are. Oh, master Warlock, what a nice picture! Wouldn't you _moight_ like some flowers there, on the bottom? Here, draw from this."

Aziraphale offered a lilac flower to Warlock, setting it down beside the child as an inspiration for his coloring. Aziraphale hadn’t gotten up to pick the flower from the bushes. Again with the miracling of the Dowlings’ plants. That was cheating - plants got lazy and spotted when they didn’t think they had to do any work.

“You know,” Crowley added quietly as Warlock stabbed the point of his red pencils through his sheet of paper to create some much-needed texture, “if you keep making all these flowers bloom, the Dowlings are going to throw another garden party. And we wouldn’t want that. I know how you loathe the interaction. _Oh, Brother Francis, what have you done to the lilacs to make them so vibrant? Let’s sit and talk for hours about it_ ,” Crowley concluded, pitching his voice especially high. 

Aziraphale looked put out at the idea of a garden party, but his focus was on Warlock. “My dear, I didn’t make the flowers bloom. Perhaps it was them?” He suggested, nodding to across the sprawling lawns. 

Them? 

Crowley turned her face back towards the neighboring estate, where the crying had come from this morning. She squinted at the gated swimming pool. A man, presumably the father of the household, was standing by the fence, leaning close to a pretty lady younger by perhaps ten years. Each human occasionally threw glances back to the windows of the main house, as if they were dealing blow instead of talking. They seemed to be enjoying each other’s company, while splashes of water thrown up behind them in the sunlight illustrated how content the children were. Or perhaps it illustrated them drowning. 

Interestingly, the father had a considerable amount of sour guilt clinging to him, like bats to a cavern ceiling. Crowley nearly had to cover her nose. 

Crowley looked back at Aziraphale. Warlock was still stabbing. “Since when do humans make flowers bloom?”

“They surprise me everyday,” said Aziraphale fondly, staring at the pair. He settled his elbow against his knee, face in hand. His cheeks, dotted with the fine white hair of his ridiculous sideburns, were round and pink with the sun at this hour. Then, as Crowley always saw him do when basking in Love, Aziraphale sighed dreamily.

What had Earth done to deserve the attention of this angel? Crowley softened. 

Aziraphale blinked rapidly. His comically large white brows furrowed. Then, he smiled, turning to beam at Crowley. She could have melted. 

“That’s rather _illicit,_ isn’t it?” Aziraphale bumped his elbow into Crowley’s. 

Melting over. “What?” said Crowley in a high voice. Her back straightened out sharply and she went on, too fast, “What is? What’s illicit?”

Aziraphale gestured broadly to the people across the lawn. The younger woman and the father. Aziraphale smiled a little wider. “In love with the nanny, hm?”

As if Crowley was in on the joke. “Oh, them.” Her shoulders eased. Hadn’t realized they’d felt tense and tight. 

When she retired for the evening that day, Crowley wondered. What had she thought Aziraphale meant?

-/-

_Six Days Before the End of the World. England._

Crowley clicked off the radio, and Dagon's voice halted. He sat back in the driver's seat slowly, at a loss, staring blankly at the dials. 

"So," started Aziraphale from the passenger’s, frozen mid-smearing of cake from his face with an ancient handkerchief. "No dog."

"No dog."

Aziraphale swallowed. "Wrong boy."

They turned to each other. 

"Wrong boy," Crowley agreed. 

-/-

_Two Days to the End of the World. Tadfield Manor, England._

"Quite convenient, isn't it? A fire, exactly where we needed it not to be," said Aziraphale. He shifted in the passenger's seat, sliding a hand along the leather door to grip the handle, uncomfortable with Crowley's driving. The road was long and winding, what did he want? A quiet, moonlit ride? Crowley internally rolled his eyes, turning the Bentley wildly around the next curve, headlights spinning yellow and black shadows through the trees on the hills. Under the wheels, the unpaved road bumped the car along. 

"Hellish, you could say," Crowley suggested. 

Aziraphale shifted again, perplexed. He glanced out the rear window, then the dash. "There's a very peculiar feeling to this whole area. I'm astonished you can't feel it."

Deep longing was unable to be washed from the Bentley's carpets. No. That couldn't be what Aziraphale was referencing, Aziraphale couldn't physically feel those remnants from others, the remnants that hurt, but the implication was enough to set Crowley's teeth on edge, because perhaps he was sensing something _else_ from Crowley. Paralyzing, to be so near to disaster. There wasn't enough attention to go around to focus on both the impending Armageddon _and_ finding the Antichrist _and_ Crowley having been foolish for the last few thousand years. 

Crowley zeroed in on the road instead, and definitely not where Aziraphale was nervously stroking his free hand up and down his impeccably-clad thigh. "I don't feel anything out of the ordinary."

"But it's everywhere. All around here," Aziraphale insisted. Abruptly, his eyes lit up, and he straightened, nodding to himself and Crowley with fierce conviction. "Love. Flashes of love."

Panic closed Crowley's throat. "You're being ridiculous." His knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering wheel aggressively, mouth an unhappy, grim line. "The _last_ thing we need right now is—"

_Thump_!

-/-

_The Last Day of the World. London, England._

Crowley’s shades slipped down his face and he didn’t adjust them. The whiskey burned his throat all the way down, just the same as the bookshop smoke. 

He had finally had Love within his grasp - and now it had nowhere left to go. He knew he’d had it, because now it had slipped between his shaking fingers. It had nowhere left to go.

Bitterness curled in his chest, an iron knifepoint twisting deep between his ribs. Pain radiated from everywhere with no focal point, no epicenter, and no cure. His eyes stung, his feet burned, his arms were sore, his glasses opaque and gaze unfocused. 

Nowhere left to go.

For a decade, he’d thought it might work. They might’ve made it. But it hadn’t been Warlock and they - _he_ , Crowley was alone now - didn’t know who it really was, and there was no removing the Antichrist from the world, so Crowley had done what he’d always done and tried to whisk Aziraphale from danger, only it wasn’t silly humans this time, it was Heaven and it was Hell and now everything was hurt and throbbing and _wrong_.

His chest was clenched terribly, making his ears hot and his face sweat. This was Love, when it came from the condemned: pain. No wonder Crowley was allowed to feel it.

His hand turned into a fist. He smacked it on the table, wanting to feel something, anything other than monstrous, wracking tremors, but all he did was dislodge a shot glass.

He hated Love. Better to take to the highway and rip through England’s streets, taking himself and the Bentley out in style. Drive until he was nowhere, until there was nowhere left to go because there wasn't an Earth anymore. Couldn’t let the rest of the demons get the best of him. At the last second, he’d show them up, once and for all.

Crowley deflated. He wouldn’t budge. He could hardly move in his seat, and that wasn’t because of the drinks: there was nowhere left to go, even if he wanted to run.

Everything was worthless. He didn’t care anymore.

What was the _point_ of it? What was the point of saving the world? What, exactly, would there be at the end of it? Why did everyone want this so badly? More Hell, or more Heaven, the razed Earth— none of it meant a thing if Aziraphale was gone from it.

Constantly charmed by people’s little inventions, the way they thought, the stories they wrote, their Love, and now he was _gone._ Like a light had been snuffed; a candle blown out sans a warning.

“Oh,” Crowley said, unable to hold back the agony from behind his clenched teeth. 

Besides Aziraphale being actually, really, seriously, forever gone, that was the worst of it - the worst, most horrific part of it - there hadn’t been an inkling in Crowley’s head that _Hell_ would go after Aziraphale. Curse his bookshop with hellfire, topple the shelves, burn down the whole thing, destroy his beloved piece of London. Aziraphale’s lot sent rude notes. They’d bring him back to Heaven, they’d reprimand him. A slap on the wrist, a strongly-worded letter. They didn’t do _that_. 

This was Hell’s fault. 

This was _Crowley’s_ fault. 

“Been standing since 1800,” said Crowley to no one in the bar. He sniffed back a few sorry tears. 

His tone was clipped, conversational, and dreadfully sad. “Right there on the corner. Went to the opening. Nobody else showed up. But that was because he didn’t want anybody else to show up, because then somebody might’ve bought something…” 

Bitter, tired, and pale, Crowley downed another glass of Talisker. He flipped the empty, smudging sooty fingerprints on the gleaming glass. 

_I should’ve asked just one last time._

If he hadn’t used the holy water already, Crowley might have considered using it then. Aziraphale had given it to him as insurance, and now was the time to settle a collection. Never mind that it wasn’t for the purpose he intended. 

He signaled to the barkeep for another bottle. 

Resigned to Earth’s fate, Crowley drank and waited for the end of the world.

"I never asked to be a demon," he began. 

-/-   
_The Last Day of the World. Tadfield, England._

Adam had no idea what to do. 

That much was obvious. Crowley smeared the engine oil across his face and away from his eyes, gritting his teeth together with frustration. Everything in him was sore and singed and protested the very principle of movement. Mental fog crawled into Crowley’s thoughts from the edges of his mind, whispering death at him and telling him about Adam’s ambitions: _trample the land, scale the mountains, flush the river free of fish, find the bear and take its coat…_

The very same instructions Crowley had given to early humans returned to haunt him, shaking a dismal chord in his bones. How could he have known they’d take his advice so literally?

Everything was his fault.

Never should have let the humans out of the Garden. They should have stayed safe inside forever. But the gates were open now. This was it. The world was going to end. Everything was going to go away and Crowley wouldn’t even get a chance to fight to save it because it was going to be destroyed. 

The tarmac shuddered and sucked at his feet, tugging on his boots, threatening to pull him down, but Crowley twisted his ankle and held firm, straining to stay upright. Every bone in his body shook. There was too much to do on Earth to think of retreating to the bowels of Hell now, too much pain and hard-lined confusion permeating the atmosphere and overwhelming him. Aziraphale had returned, was never really truly gone, and the world started spinning again, but very soon that would stop.

Violent, crushing pressure suddenly forced Crowley to his knees, shoving the breath from his lungs. No, no, no. _He’s coming, it’s too late. No!_ The tire iron clattered to the pavement, and the tarmac shook fiercely as Crowley collapsed, head pounding and vision going off-kilter and slitted.

He grabbed his neck, trying to lessen the horror that pulsed from every living being as the ground cracked open. The cracks spread rapidly, striking hot through the pavement and glowing red from Below. Fans of heat burned his face, and Aziraphale flinched away.

At Adam’s opposite side, Aziraphale looked at him, panic painted over his expression and dousing Crowley’s senses. Crowley had not seen him with that sword since the Beginning at the Garden, and his glance then had been fleeting. Now, Aziraphale held the hilt in one hand, shifting his weight for balance as the ground began to rumble more vigorously. Long, deep fissures split the pavement to their left. 

They exchanged a meaningful look, and Aziraphale glanced to his sword, the cloudy daylight giving it an unearthly gleam. It was too late, Crowley wanted to scream, but Aziraphale was not ready to give up: his stance widened, his jaw set, and some _new_ feeling began to pour from him, whitebright and swooping, and he whirled on Crowley. 

“Come up with something! Or— or,” Aziraphale swung his sword away, ''or I’ll never talk to you again.”

Crowley turned away, eyes wide. What could they do? What could they do to him that wasn’t already headed his way?

More time. That was it, they needed more time. The smell of engine grease, smoke, and foiling metal imprinted on the back of his nose, remnants of the Bentley and the beast about to emerge, distracting and burning as Crowley tried desperately to think of a solution. There was something he could do, there had to be! No God would give him the answer without giving him the means! 

Adam had no idea what to do, but Crowley did.

_I need more time!_

Against everything that threatened to pull him under the Earth, through the soil and into fire, Crowley snatched his tire iron and rose, throwing his hands into the air and reaching for the fabric that Earth was woven into. There, reality bent and shimmered, like fine yarn at a loom. He screamed with effort, hauling three beings and three corporeal bodies into existence on a separate plane.

The tremors stopped. 

Still white nothingness, blissful nothingness, greeted Crowley when he opened his eyes. It hurt to look at. He squinted, blinking rapidly to adjust quicker. For just a moment - he could only give Adam a few precious minutes, he’d done it. _This is my gift to you, this time. Use it wisely._

Crowley paused, gathering his wits and breath. His shoulders quivered, chest heaving with the effort, until, at once, the pressure lifted.

This place felt different than Earth. Peach-pink and rolling, like a down feather gracing a bed of moss beside a cool creek. At the same time, the new feeling was deep and sinking, curling into Crowley’s chest and matching the uplifted spirit of Aziraphale’s unsteady determination. 

What was this? By any account, this place should’ve be black and angry like a rattlesnake poised to strike, and it should’ve been frightening. The three of them should’ve been scared. Crowley shouldn’t have been able to bring peace - with the intense terror for their fates at his pit, he should have created something smoggy and dismal. Instead, everything was slow and heated, pushing and pulling and taking and ebbing like a pond of stillwater under oak shade.

His jaw ached with the force he’d been screaming with. From the white nothingness, Crowley pulled a new pair of sunglasses and replaced them over his nose, tucking the temples behind his ears.

It felt… warm. Aziraphale was speaking, Crowley registered, and perhaps he was as well.

He spun the tire iron in his hand as the exquisite stretch of his wings, finally released, pulled each tremor from his figure - the power of his true nature strengthened his grip as he formed a fist until his knuckles were white with strain. Hell and Heaven and the end of the world were waiting just outside of this timeless place, and there was something terrible to be afraid of rising from Hell, but now it was worth the fear. 

Relishing in what he’d always despised, Crowley closed his eyes and popped his neck, allowing Earth’s terror to fill him. It was his own now, the same as love was his, and it emboldened him. 

“Whatever you decide,” Aziraphale said to Adam, his sword igniting on a powerful upswing, “we’ll be beside you.”

Freshly determined, Crowley took Adam’s other hand. 

-/- 

_The Night Before The Rest of Their Lives. London, England._

Adam had put everything back the way it was, which meant Crowley’s heart should’ve been replaced in his chest. 

Instead, he caught himself lingering over Aziraphale’s face, fixated on the way the streetlamp above their bench highlighted the stray white hairs and the deep-set lines under his eyes and beside his mouth. He tracked the sad slope of his arms while he offered the box to the postman, and his fake smile when he gave back the sword. Everything Crowley thought about was covered in a thin glaze of disbelief, like droplets of rainwater on window panes after a storm. Tonight had been the end for Earth, everyone had been so sure. Inexplicably, it had not turned out that way. 

And now Crowley had to deal with an Earth that wasn’t gone, and an Earth that still held Aziraphale, and an Earth that kept all of Crowley’s Love. _Angel, is that what it had been? All these years?_ Warmth. Reassurance. _Knowing._

He couldn’t bring himself to rationalize his feelings, or even consider what Aziraphale would think of his poor judgement and awful love. Physical weight settled on his chest, like a lump that couldn’t be removed. 

Presently, Aziraphale nodded, and together they boarded the bus. Crowley silently took the window seat and Aziraphale sat beside him, eyes closed and breathing deeply. Hurt prickled at Crowley’s eyes, just watching him. It was the bookshop that he was upset about, it had to be, and a thick tug of guilt wracked Crowley’s chest. Like nothing else, he desperately wanted to wrap his arms around Aziraphale and be embraced in turn, to do nothing but sit on the bus, wrapped together, as it drove towards home again. 

His waterline prickled, overwhelmed, and he pressed bodily into the side of the bus, letting the metal cool his high internal temperature. Hell, everything in him ached and was drained of energy, but his mind kept blooming. 

There it was. It was here. Crowley felt it. Just… _the real thing,_ instead of the leftovers; instead of feeling what humans felt when Love had been ripped from them; instead of feeling lapses where Love was meant to be. Instead of having Aziraphale explain it to him and instead of having to listen and never experience. There was a difference, of course. This feeling wasn’t coming from anyone else but Crowley.

Crowley knew it in the bookshop. From the first plume of smoke that he’d seen curling above Soho, from that first jump in his stomach and the closure of his throat, he’d known it. Learning it then had hurt, it had scorched him as if he were the epicenter of the fire.

He must remain alert. They were out of the woods Armageddon-wise, but Gabriel and Beelzebub knew that it was their fault that they did not get their sought-after war. Now they were planning; Beelzebub worked efficiently when it was out of spite. Putting on his glasses, Crowley leaned closer to his companion, not touching but grazing, appreciating the warmth that poured from Aziraphale’s body. Bloody space heater. 

He gently turned the bus driver in the direction of his flat, scanning the incoming lights of London outside the tinted windows. Crowley said quietly, “We've got to figure out a plan.”

Aziraphale swallowed and nodded solemnly again. It had been centuries since he’d become accustomed to Crowley jumping into conversations midway as if they’d began it together and coherently. Crowley could burst into tears (and he was very near to it) at the thought of being understood. He bit down hard on his bottom lip and the prick of pain lent him a brief spout of lucidity.

Ideas simmered in the back of Crowley’s mind until the bus arrived at his flat, stopping right outside the stoop despite there being no regular stop. They disembarked, Crowley carefully following Aziraphale into the building and up the elevator. He watched their backs, searching the dark for an angelic or demonic follower, and snapped an extra lock into being for building’s main door. 

Aziraphale timidly stepped into the shadowed flat after Crowley unlocked it. Upon crossing the threshold, Aziraphale whitened and touched his nose, having seen the puddle of Ligur, and suppressed a shudder. It reeked of something foul and something holy all mixed together in a martini shaker, and it was stinking up the flat. 

“Ignore that,” said Crowley, flipping on the light switch, regretting it immediately when it proved too bright. Shaping to his will, the chandelier dimmed until they were left in a smoky darkness.

“But… who is…?”

“Ligur. Well, was.”

Aziraphale shook off his surprise. “When…?” 

He had to be very careful here. _Don’t tell him you were waiting, don’t tell him you were going to ask again._ “Just when I was about to leave for Alpha Centauri, when Hell figured out it was my fault.”

Aziraphale sidestepped the mess and kept his distance from the white wig on Crowley’s desk. His eyes lifted, visually exploring the room. Aziraphale’d never been here before, and now he peered curiously at the high ceilings, the ornate desk and its chair, and the stone statue of an eagle in the hall, while keeping his hands tucked in close as was his habit. Definitely a good thing that Crowley kept many of his historical belongings in storage and off display. Couldn’t imagine how the nude sculptures would go over. 

The lights from passing cars below skimmed yellow along the back wall, moving paintings in the night.

Trepidation and worry flowed from Aziraphale. Softening, Crowley approached him, offering his hand. Aziraphale raised his, looking at Crowley skeptically, then let it fall back to his side.

Crowley clarified, clearing his throat, “Your coat.”

“Ah.” Aziraphale nodded and removed the heavier beige coat. Crowley hung it on the rack near the front door, then lifted his palm once more. Aziraphale smiled nervously, standing in his dirty waistcoat. “I’d prefer to leave my shoes on, given the flooring situation,” said Aziraphale, once again casting a glance to Ligur’s slimy remains.

He waited for Aziraphale’s hand, but it did not meet his. Never had. Perhaps neither of them had changed that much after the events of today, even though Crowley felt a million years older. Crowley had been the same since they started this dance of theirs; it was Aziraphale who had to change.

But there was no sense in forcing it.

There was no confidence in Crowley’s demeanor - he’d spent every cent of it in Tadfield when he stared down the end of the world. It was all he wanted from Aziraphale, just a touch and nothing more meaningful past that. A comfort. He wanted to be comforted. His cheeks heated, embarrassed, but could he be blamed? In the past they had sat beside each other in a warm train compartment, waiting for their trip to finish; they’d walked arm-and-arm through Victorian London in the name of disguise; they had pulled each other out of the messiest stupors, like in France.

That was in the past. These times were changed and hard, and Crowley found himself longing for the old ones, before the Armageddon business and before they had both settled into their respective roles so concretely. _I want to go back,_ he thought, _let me go back._

“I…” Crowley started. He reached up to his face, removing his glasses with a subtly shaking hand and stared openly at Aziraphale with a pinched expression. Aziraphale’s lips parted. “Today… I. You weren’t there. At the bookshop. I-I couldn’t stop it burning down, I’m really sorry. I would’ve stopped it if I could…” 

Aziraphale’s eyes stuttered around the room in disbelief, avoiding Crowley’s snake eyes. “It was hellfire, then.”

How could Crowley tell the truth without giving everything away? No, it wasn’t Hell or Heaven’s fire that burned the bookshop down, it was human fire, but Aziraphale was gone and so the bookshop hadn’t mattered. The sole reason Crowley ever liked to lounge around inside was because Aziraphale was lounging around inside too.

He dropped his hand, feeling stone-heavy, and turned away from the angel and strode across the room to his balcony. A pair of potted ferns quivered in the corner by the doorway as he walked past, sensing his growing agitation. “No,” he said. “No, well— I don’t, I don’t know if it was.”

“Then… Crowley, tell me it wasn’t Heaven’s fire. It couldn’t kill you, but the burns... Are you alright?”

Crowley laughed. Alright? He opened the French doors, the rose curtains billowing into the room, and walked out onto the tiled balcony. Whispers of cool confusion dripped tropical heat in the night air. He breathed it in, clearing Ligur from his lungs and finding comfort in the fact that this feeling was widespread, yet subtle and not as consuming as humanity’s terror had been. Humans weren’t sure what had happened today, and to be frank, neither was Crowley (or Aziraphale, he was sure, but Aziraphale held his own bewilderment in very well), and that leaked out into the world. 

He didn’t know if it was hellfire in Aziraphale’s shop. He hadn’t bothered to check, all he’d registered was that Aziraphale was gone and that someone had killed his best friend. That was all that mattered, _still_ mattered. He touched his stiff hair, inspecting the dark liquid that came away between his fingers. It was still coated in engine grease and spiked in the wrong directions. Crowley frowned, barely holding back a whimper. The poor Bentley. It was the littlest of what he nearly lost today, but he’d had it since new, and now it was crumbled to bits and probably still smoking on the pavement in Tadfield. It lasted a lot longer than his company on Earth usually did.

Crowley peered downward at the traffic lazily pulling itself through the streets below, imagining how much faster he’d go. Headlights lit up the sidewalks and untouched shop windows, and street lamps cast shadows over pedestrians making their way home in the darkness.

Behind him, soft footsteps grew in volume until Aziraphale joined him at the balcony railing.

“Look at them,” Crowley sneered. “Everyone is so slow.”

“They’re only human.”

_Only human._ They held more freedom in their short lives than Aziraphale or Crowley had had in all of theirs. They weren’t obligated by their greater rulers to meddle. Adam, human, stopped the end of the world, and still nobody would go after him like they would Crowley and Aziraphale.

Aziraphale closed his eyes and breathed in London, the breeze lifting his hair and drawing Crowley’s attention. What Crowley wouldn’t give to be the wind, he thought, his frustration beginning to fade.

Silently, Aziraphale moved to hold the balcony railing with both hands, leaving Crowley mesmerized by the subtle curl of his fingers over the metal. The golden signet ring that had been there forever gleamed in the reflected city light that streamed from tall buildings. Like a mosaic, in orange windows across the world, humans were talking, eating, laughing, and kissing while being generally confused. 

The confusion would fade in time and balance out, and London would settle into Crowley’s beloved quiet once more, complete with the occasional cold spots or annoyances. He pictured it now, that quiet, gales sweeping over moors and sweetgrass, the sea rushing into pale chalk cliffs, the lazy pull of London traffic… Fear, pain, suffering, confusion - everything faded. Everything Crowley ever felt always faded in the end; none of it lasted forever. 

“Does it ever fade?” asked Crowley quietly, for if he spoke too loudly it would shatter their little bubble that kept them away from their troubles.

Aziraphale blinked open his eyes. He looked immensely tired - drained, worked to death. “Does what fade?”

Today, Aziraphale had given up everything he’d ever known. His platoon, his side, his home, his cause, his beliefs... Crowley was struck, because for all the time they’d known each other, for all the time Aziraphale had been on Earth, Crowley had already doubted and given that away. Hell was nothing to him. But to Aziraphale, Heaven held the people that were supposed to love him, and support him; the people who weren’t supposed to look down their noses at him and sneer when Aziraphale didn’t wish for a war.

God. This hurt. It hurt.

Crowley pushed a hand to his chest beneath his jacket, trying to physically quell the sore hurt. “Love.” Crowley sniffed, the scent of the Bentley’s smoke thick in his sinuses. Satan, that would never come out of him, would it? It’d linger forever.

“I’m… not sure of what you mean.” 

“I mean it like this: everything I feel eventually goes away. These places we’ve always visited where you’ve felt _it_ so strongly, does it stay there always?”

“There’s always a subtle background…” began Aziraphale.

“But it stops? Eventually?” 

Aziraphale would help him. Aziraphale would tell him that Love went away and that Crowley wouldn’t feel like this forever. Aziraphale turned his face away. Crowley tracked the line of his throat as he swallowed heavily. After a beat, Aziraphale shut his eyes again as if recalling a very painful memory. “It grew so quiet, there.”

Crowley bit the inside of his cheek, waiting for an explanation, because pushing would do no good and it might come off as frightening. A half-second later he grew impatient, his irritation at their lack of autonomy returning. “Where?”

“On the tarmac. In Tadfield. There was hardly anything I could sense except for the hope that was deep within Adam. He loves Tadfield, and that’s the only thing that kept him from destroying Earth. It… it was so quiet, because there wasn’t anyone on Earth feeling Love, they were all frightened.” 

When put like that, quiet sounded scary. Crowley deflated, the night hushing over his words and tugging them out of him. In the dark it was alright to talk like this, to act almost freely under an open starry sky. There would be trouble come morning but for now it felt like nothing could touch either of them except for Aziraphale’s dreaded quiet. Would they ever be _done_? Out there, Hell watched and plotted, and Crowley was never going to get away from them. “You don’t like the quiet.”

“No. I don’t. It means there is something wrong and horrible happening - it means there’s no Love. Look at what happened today!” Aziraphale stared at Crowley, pained. “We almost died. Everything almost died. It was so close - too close.”

“But we stopped it—”

“It was too close, Crowley!”

Crowley jerked back, surprised by Aziraphale’s firm tone. There were very few times Aziraphale had shouted at him and Crowley could count them on five fingers. One of them had been earlier this week, when Aziraphale claimed that they had no business hanging around each other and that they remained mortal enemies despite everything they’d gone through.

Bad track record this week for Crowley, wasn’t it? Whatever he’d said, he took it back. Chest tight, Crowley tilted his head, peering up at the night sky. Dark blue clouds rolled over endless black, and pinpoints of light glowed between them. The stars were the only reason he missed the country.

Aziraphale exhaled harshly. “I apologize.”

“I forgive you,” said Crowley, staring up. “I shouldn’t have let it get that close. I’m sorry, angel.”

Next to him, Aziraphale did the same, starlight and city flares painting him in a world of neon to Crowley’s senses. Quiet spots and worry saturated the air, and Aziraphale was everything - yellow headlights and white windows, blue moon reflections over Sahara dunes and ancient purple tile. 

Crowley tightened his grip on the railing.

“It’s beautiful,” said Aziraphale.

“Hard to believe God made the Earth just to be a battlefield, isn’t it?” 

Distraught, Aziraphale suddenly turned to him with big eyes watery and red-rimmed. “Oh, Crowley, _stop._ I _can’t_ bring myself to believe She ever intended this.”

Caught-out and windswept, Crowley lowered his voice. He hadn’t meant to be tempting or manipulative, but in hindsight that’s what it looked like, and the fact that he’d taunted Aziraphale to tears made him shrink back. “I thought,” he said, “that you believe She intended everything.”

“I—” Aziraphale began. He reached to touch his hand to his mouth carefully, a light caress of his own lip, like he could cover any doubt that would emerge. Crowley didn’t understand. He’d doubted so much over the thousands of years that they had known each other and Crowley had seen it almost every time they met, and now Aziraphale was covering it up? When it no longer mattered? When they were God-only-knows how many seconds from surefire destruction? 

Crowley could take it no longer. “Aziraphale. It’s over. We prevented the end of the world - we helped. Just a little. Take down your hands.”

Aziraphale shook his head, a weak and strangled laugh escaping him.

“Take down your hands. We weren’t at all competent, but we were _us._ Hell and Heaven’s only two representatives here on Earth, the only people who know what it’s like. We— _I— I_ was terrible at my job! Nobody else even _knew_ Earth was worth saving,” Crowley said, angling his body to be in line with Aziraphale’s and trying to look reasonable. “But you did. _We_ did.”

“I’m not worried about what we’ve done,” Aziraphale stated, uncovering his mouth. The tremble in his voice was gone and that relieved Crowley - it might break something within him to see Aziraphale cry now, after the tension of the day had left him hollow and prone to upset. “I’m worried about what’s _going_ to happen. We haven’t made a mistake, I know that much, but Heaven doesn’t feel the same.”

The night breeze swept up from the pavement, gently blowing through the thin sleeves of Aziraphale’s shirt. Contempative and staring out at London’s high-rises, the angel looked lost in deep thought about their futures. Aziraphale’s waistcoat was rumpled and face saddened, and he had the tiniest smear of motor oil on one shoulder.

Barely a speck of black grease, but there was no way Aziraphale could _not_ have noticed the stain when he noticed absolutely everything about his clothes or his books or his shop.

Aziraphale’s worry was strong, then, and that speck of grease was the evidence Crowley needed to convict. The worry simmered low near Crowley’s heels like a bad dog looking to bite an Achilles’ tendon or two, and it snapped at him when Aziraphale cautioned a glance up. Accustomed to the burning intensity of anger and suffering, the cold wash of plain _sadness_ from Aziraphale struck Crowley upside the head. 

God, why didn’t Aziraphale say something about the spot on his coat? Why didn’t he say anything about it? Too much lingered in Aziraphale’s eyes when they sought out Crowley’s. Knowing that he was the root cause, having failed to stop the bookshop from burning down and having failed to save the two of them from utter destruction or eternal damnation, hurt a bit more than it strictly should have. Choked him up, too.

At once, Crowley’s body stuttered, half-collapsing over the balcony railing, his elbows bent and a hand covering his face as it grew hotter and hotter, his ears reddening. A spike of hesitant concern shot from Aziraphale’s direction, cold again, and Crowley missed his glasses and wished he hadn’t pulled them off. 

“God, Aziraphale,” managed Crowley around an embarrassing voice crack, “what are we doing?”

“What?” Aziraphale’s voice searched for a mumble of clarification, so quiet and soft, while being barely more than a bewildered mumble itself. Aziraphale’s fatigue was bone-deep, which made Crowley more unsettled. 

“What are we _doing?”_ Crowley repeated, ripping his hand from his face. “What are we _doing?_ There’s no way we come out of this. We’ve been stupid. Heaven’s got plenty of ways to deal with bad angels, they’ve done that before, and Hell’s literal purpose is to torture and kill for all eternity and destroy whatever opposes them. How did we think this? How did we think this would work?”

Aziraphale skimmed a hand along the railing towards Crowley and a freezing, troubled worry began to wash over the demon’s skin, prompting chills and goosepimples. “Crowley, we don’t know—”

“ _They_ know! They know what we’ve done and even if it’s a good thing by God, we both know they couldn’t give a damn about Her will. That’s all they need to know: they don’t need to know how, or why, or when, it’s enough that they’ve figured out it was our fault. We’re well and fucked now.” Crowley shivered, listening to his own fear creep up his throat and cut away his will to breathe. dread closed his airways. How were they going to come out of this? How could they get away with what they’d done?

For them there remained the stars. Crowley jerked upright, spooking Aziraphale’s lingering hand, expectantly perched on the rail, and he fixated on the starry night sky above London. If they could get high enough, they could fly there, they only needed to break the atmosphere and that wouldn’t be very difficult because Crowley didn’t believe in the atmosphere anyways… 

“There’s no more running, Crowley.”

Crowley’s mind landed back on the balcony. The fern at the doorway shivered with anticipation, just the same as Crowley did.

“There’s— we could go.”

A fierce expression overtook Aziraphale’s placid composure, his drawn brows half-shadowed by the city lights. The curve of his jaw stood out prominently on one edge, betraying the clench of his teeth. “I see you looking, my dear. This is where we are. I am not running from a place I have a duty to.”

“If we stay here, we will die. You will _die,_ you, Aziraphale.”

“We aren’t going to leave.”

“Why can’t you listen to me? Why aren’t you listening? You can _be dead,_ angel,” Crowley shouted.

“Stop it.”

Aziraphale didn’t understand. Crowley’s whole form trembled with desperation for Aziraphale to accept what had happened, as his body finally began to process it himself. “Heaven isn’t _in charge anymore,_ angel! That was it! Our contracts have run out! Nothing, nada, expired, termination of employment. They don’t tell you what to do—!”

“ _I’m_ in charge,” said Aziraphale. “And I’m telling _you_ what to do. Come up with something! You’ve always done it before! We are not going. We’re not leaving, Crowley.” 

Gnarled roots of discontent twisted around in the cavern of Crowley’s stomach as his fingers dug into the railing. Aziraphale’s hand searched the metal and settled firmly on Crowley’s, drawing a sharp inhale from them both.

Aziraphale recovered first, his voice strong and proud. “I won’t go. We’re both meant to be here. It’s no accident that we were both put in the Garden on the same day. You don’t want to go, and I certainly don’t want to go.” 

Crowley caught his trembling lip between his teeth. Even skin-deep, Aziraphale was right. Aziraphale’s hand warmed his, but it couldn’t keep Crowley from gently repeating, pleading, “Your bookshop isn't there anymore, angel. What are you staying for?”

“What did you tempt me with? When you first told me about Adam? Eleven years ago.” Aziraphale drew a deep breath. “You told me things I loved about the Earth. You told me the truth - that they would be destroyed. That everything would be. Think about this: do you regret saving the Earth?” 

“No.” Not for a heartbeat did he hesitate: from the second Dagon and Hastur handed over the Antichrist, Crowley had plotted to stop Hell’s plans from advancing. He wasn’t a traitor, Earth was God’s master work and he intended to keep it spinning in the sky. 

“There. Then that is reason enough to stay. I love it. Humans are strange, and so are half the things they do, but there isn’t any Love in Heaven.” Aziraphale faced the cityscape, certain in a way that Crowley could not be. “Not of the same kind.” 

Limply, Crowley tipped his hand into the protective cup of Aziraphale’s, fiercely refusing to look at the spot where they joined together. Among the things they’d done today, this was the most benign of their affronts to Head Office, but it was difficult to handle when Crowley was accustomed to an untoward smile being contraband. Those boundaries weren’t important anymore and they could construct something new and better, if only they had time.

Heaven wasn’t in charge anymore, not of Aziraphale. 

Crowley used to think they’d get all the time in the world. Now he knew better.

Aziraphale tightened his grip, stepping closer.  
  
Crowley battled the urge to hush him, to rip his hand away, to lean in, to point out the significance of secrets, to do anything to bring Aziraphale to his senses. Instead, a sigh pushed itself from Crowley’s lungs like the lull of offshore breaker waves. He fell back on the request whose answer he knew by heart, one that never failed to satisfy him. 

“Tell me what it feels like.” 

“It’s all very empty…”

He shook his head. “Not Heaven. Earth. Not today, we’re still recovering... Always, tell me what it always feels like.”

Aziraphale smiled. He stretched, shoulders rolling back, bringing his free hand to his chest and drawing in peace, like he was gathering inspiration and breathing in London. “Ah. Let me begin with tonight. It’s very complicated. Bound to be, I suppose, with Armageddon and all.”

“Lots of memory-holes to close up.”

“Adam’s got a busy night ahead,” said Aziraphale, tucking his chin in a nod. His lashes flirted down, painted gold from the lights, and a sly smile stretched his lips. The tension and the worry he held had drained somewhat, and the biting snake near Crowley’s ankles no longer wished to snap. “Starting to remember, now, give me a moment. We didn’t know a thing about Earth at the start except that it had a Garden and two humans that I was supposed to keep an eye on, so you can imagine my surprise when Eve didn’t feel like herself that fateful day!”

The corners of Crowley’s mouth turned up. He laughed, a little delirious. When would he have expected that today would end with him holding Aziraphale’s hand in his flat, rather than standing on a burning world? “You’re telling me that Heaven didn’t let you know you could sense Love before they sent you down?” 

“Heavens, no,” said Aziraphale, and then blinked when he noticed his turn of phrase, and chuckled quietly. “The rest of them figured it out after awhile.”

“Same with us. All Hell knew was that I ought to get up there and stir up some trouble.”

“It was an unexpected sign-on bonus, we’ll call it.” Aziraphale smirked. “Lord. I remember Mumbai last century.”

“You remember the baked goat, more like.”

”Everyone loved that, that’s why I remember it.” A car honked below them, urging a driver to begin down the street. The world still existed. 

“That’s why you had to eat it for an hour straight?”

“Hush! Let me think.” Aziraphale suppressed his smile, and Crowley busied himself trying not to smile like a moron in turn. This was what he wanted - Aziraphale’s touch, grounding him, and Aziraphale’s voice, spinning poetry just for Crowley’s ears. Even if the poetry was made out of food. “Do you remember that wine in Constantinople? It was spiced. Paprika and saffron. Of course, you don’t expect those things to be in wine, not back then. They work brilliantly alone and better together, and it’s a subtle taste, but one that sits on the back of your tongue until the next thing you drink. Being on Earth is liked being in-between your drinks in that regard. It’s a constant, unexpected pinch of spice. It makes everything interesting and enjoyable, even the quiet parts. And it’s always coming on, rolling and rolling, from...” Aziraphale’s smile twitched. His brows drew together, expression dropping.

A phantom itch shivered over Crowley’s knuckles, and he flexed his hand to rid himself of it. Quick as a serpent, Aziraphale snapped his away as if scalded by boiling oil.

They began at the same time: 

“Er, sorry—”

“ _You.”_

Crowley took a pause before panic set in because there was _no_ reason to stress about this. There wasn’t anything the matter with him. Regardless, the back of his neck crawled and grew hot. “Me?”

“I don’t know! No, nothing, nothing’s wrong, it’s only... you.” 

“Aziraphale.”

The angel’s eyes were white all the way around, a deep crease between his eyebrows. Aziraphale stepped back, the evidence of a great shock running thick around him in nasty, electric spirals of gold. He was moving away! What had Crowley done, why had he asked that? “ _You’re_ where it’s coming from. But you... you can’t?” 

Ah.

White noise rang in Crowley’s ears, blocking out the dull rumble of traffic and wind as a numbness spread from his toes to his head. His face reddened, and nausea coiled low in his gut. Unsteady, he clenched the railing, failing to ground himself as well as Aziraphale’s hand had done. If he leapt off here now, the streets would rush up to meet him, and he could fly away, but Aziraphale flew faster and could catch him.

This was not happening. This did not happen. This was a nightmare and Crowley was dreaming in bed alone, he’d been dreaming for years already and so what was the harm in another nightmare? Why did his mind let this cruel trick run so long? Centuries had been spent keeping this secret, even from himself, and now Aziraphale was forcibly dragging it into the open like a too-curious child. 

There were risks to anything Crowley did at this moment, but there was no decision to be made because Crowley’s mouth was already running for him. “I-I didn’t do it, I don’t know how, it can’t be me. I’m no background, I’m front and center. Don’t be stupid, Aziraphale.” 

Aziraphale warily regarded Crowley from a length away. He was breathless when he replied, “It can’t be anything else.”

Defensive, Crowley snapped, “We’ve gone over this time after time - I can’t feel things that way.”

“There’s something—”

“There’s nothing—”

“I wouldn’t feel anything if there was _nothing_ , Crowley! You would be quiet, you would be silent!” 

Crowley slumped back against the balcony, all dead weight.

Aziraphale pressed on, one hand curled into a fist. He was shaking with effort, voice repressed. “You would be absolutely silent if you were as devoid of feeling as you think you are. You would be a black hole among the stars. But instead, you’re - you’re _bursting_ with it.”

Caught. 

(At last.)

Alarm pooled in Crowley’s limbs, knocking him off-balance. They stood there in silence, staring at each other, with Crowley quivering and gripping the balcony railing for dear life, and Aziraphale staring him down, daring him to rise to challenge him again. There wasn’t anything left to say, was there? No defense could be taken. Aziraphale knew he was right. Crowley felt what he felt, and he hadn’t been clever enough to take measures to conceal it.

Aziraphale went on, “You’ve never been quiet. I should have seen it.” 

Crowley slouched, his grandiosity and efforts to keep up appearances seeping out of him. His head hurt. His body ached. His hair was greased back with the poor Bentley’s engine oil. He’d had a very long week, and now he was going to lose his best friend twice in one day. Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to dig his fingernails into his skin and leave imprints that would shock him out of this nightmare and keep him from crying.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Crowley murmured. That was the worst part of it - how easy it had been to Love Aziraphale and his nifty reading spectacles and his borderline pretentiousness and his adoration of Olde English, and the inner light of him. If he could’ve chosen, he never would’ve put Aziraphale in harm’s way, never would’ve tempted him, for it was his fault alone that they were in this mess. Aziraphale would be singing victorious war cries and playing Heaven’s trumpets if it weren’t for him.

Aziraphale’s jaw worked, Crowley caught the shadow of a clenched muscle against the cityscape. “It never is.”

“How do you know what it is?” 

The angel broke their locked gaze, eyes shining. He closed them, lashes fluttering. “It’s different than it’s been before.”

Crowley straightened, gasping. “You knew. You knew before today.”

“I didn’t know what sort of Love it was before today. It... changed, today. I knew that for all your protest, you loved the Earth.” Aziraphale glanced back, then away. “I didn’t know it was quite so... passionate.”

There was nowhere to run. Crowley turned his face over his shoulder, looking for a way out. Through the balcony doors, over the Ligur-puddle, out into the hallway, out into London... But Hell was waiting for him out there, and Heaven was waiting for Aziraphale. He couldn’t leave him. He hung his head, drained. Nowhere left to go, just like before. “Aziraphale, I know it isn’t right. It’s not the right way, it can’t be, and I know, and you never have to speak to me again... Before tonight ends. If either of us don’t survive the night, or tomorrow, or whenever they decide to come for us..”

His blood sang how badly this had all gone.

Slowly, he drew his glasses from nowhere, unfolding the temples with a care he hadn’t known only a few hours prior. The angel interrupted him before he could put the glasses over his nose, stopping him with a hand encircling his wrist. Aziraphale gently laid weight on it, pushing Crowley’s glasses down and away from his face.

“Don’t,” Crowley said without pulling away.

Aziraphale visibly swallowed, harrowed gaze boring into Crowley’s watery one. His fingers curled around Crowley’s bones, his warmth saturating marrow and blood. “I thought you loved the Earth. I didn’t know about the rest of it until today.”

Numb, Crowley choked. “The rest of it?”

“You’re Constantinople on the back of my tongue. You’re everywhere, Crowley, and you’ve never faded.” He turned their hands, drawing Crowley’s glasses away from him and snapping them out of existence. Unprotected, Crowley could only stare. “I thought I knew better than you because I felt what you didn’t. And I never meant to push you away, but I have, over and over again. It was— oh. It was what the situation called for, do you understand?”

Dumbstruck, Crowley nodded.   
  
“At the beginning, I’d thought it was the Earth alone. People leave things behind, see.”

“I know.”

“Yes. Love is one of them, though I understand your senses differ from mine. Crowley, I've felt... the most beautiful things in the world, in the universe. I've felt Love and thrill and interest - it’s from you as much as it is humans. That’s how Earth had always felt. Always. Since the Garden.” Aziraphale's cheeks rose with a shy smile. "You're kind. I figured out you loved the Earth along the way, but it's been there since the start. You loved your car. And many humans."

Very quietly, with his voice nearly drowned out by the wind, Crowley rasped, “Well, I’ve loved you since the start, I think. Figures where that would be where it began to come on.”  
  
Every nerve in Crowley’s body stood to attention, the bubbling- _snap_ of anxiety retreating to make way for anticipation. Aziraphale gripped Crowley’s thin wrists, encircling both of them now, two points of long-earned and reassuring contact. Aziraphale laced their fingers together, stepping forward, shoes bumping softly against the balcony tiles. 

Crowley swallowed past a lump in his throat, trying not to allow upset to burst out of him. Tonight was where the string snapped, where the tension reached an indefinable height, where Aziraphale returned his enamored gaze. If he was being led on, this was a cruel joke, and at the thought, Crowley doubled his efforts to hang onto Aziraphale. Every nerve in his system was alight, on pins-and-needles, and anxiety drove into him as he imagined what Aziraphale's experience of these last few thousand years had been in comparison to his own. “And you?”

"Oh, Crowley. I've had the wool pulled over my eyes for so long." Aziraphale's lip wobbled. "You deserved none the spite I've thrown at you, I've been so wrong about everything! About God and the angels, and about Armageddon and the Antichrist, and oh. I shouldn't have waited - this has been my fault. I'm sorry for that."

_Say it or don't, Aziraphale._

"I love you," he said, "not as an angel to a demon or anything else, but as me to you. On our own, _as_ our own. It took me too long to unravel what it was. It's more difficult when you can't sense your own feelings over everything else.” 

A seeping burst of apricot-colored warmth expanded from Aziraphale's fingers, and it wound into the tendons in Crowley's wrist, forcing Crowley to grip Aziraphale's hand harder in fear of being drawn inside the complexities of a harrowing dream. The angel sighed and tilted his head, the tiniest smile grew and shattered the doubt left in Crowley’s heart. Aziraphale looked at Love, but he wasn’t staring at a rolling countryside, a couple, or a fallen township, or something leftover and faint - he was fixed on Crowley, like a moth to the moon. 

"It isn't your fault," said Crowley in a rush, an immense weight lifting off his shoulders, "I've been stupid, I’ve only ever hidden it.”

Aziraphale threw back his head and laughed. Thrilled, Crowley joined in with an elated, high-pitched giggle. Aziraphale rose one eyebrow like a bastard. “You hid it exceedingly well, my dear.”

In disbelief, with his cheeks aching from his wide smile and teary vision, Crowley sighed, tugging Aziraphale in by their joined hands. “To be fair, you didn’t think to look very hard.”

“Suppose I had seen its truth earlier. I wouldn’t have thought it... would be for me. Aren’t demons supposed to despise my kind?”

“They’re not your kind anymore.” Crowley swept into Aziraphale, sliding a hand around the nape of his neck and finally grazing those dream-white curls, as he tipped his head to one side and met Aziraphale’s lips.  
  


The riverbeds, the valleys, the shadowed corners, the empty bandstands - wherever they had met, the feelings came streaming back to Crowley. Anger, hate, fear, everything shifted into Love. It didn’t belittle them, strangely, it allowed them greater life on the shelf and in the quiet, where they would not touch Crowley or Aziraphale with their branching, hateful hands, again.

His thumb rubbed hard into the side of Aziraphale’s cheek as Crowley tried to pour a thousand years of longing into a searing kiss. Aziraphale met him, their noses bumping as Crowley tilted his head the other way, kissing him again. 

Crowley broke away, dizziness besetting his body and mind. It was severely compromising and difficult to speak around it, his mouth full of dry cotton. “We - we have to come up with a plan.” 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, pulling him back in by the face and hiking Crowley’s shirt out from where it tucked into his trousers. Attention sparked and fizzled hotly as Aziraphale settled his firm, steady hands onto Crowley’s waist. “Yes, we do.”

“We do,” agreed Crowley, lost for better words with the feeling of Aziraphale’s hands on his skin. Without any regard for the proper way to remove someone’s clothing on one’s own balcony, he reached down to unbutton the first of Aziraphale’s waistcoat buttons. All beige, so many damned buttons! No, no, Crowley loved the buttons, and he loved the way Aziraphale meticulously snapped each one on every afternoon after lunch.

There existed the violently consuming urge to get closer to Aziraphale, to conquer his skin and slip together in a way that allowed nothing else between them. Aziraphale stepped forward, pushing his foot between Crowley’s and crowding the demon back into the balcony railing. 

Crowley gave up and leaned fully into it, hard iron grinding into his lower back. Aziraphale’s arm slipped across the same area to shield him from the cold metal, holding Crowley completely. 

“This isn’t productive,” said Aziraphale between fevered kisses. A blush rode high on his cheeks, mottling his fair skin pink, and no color had ever been more attractive on anyone in history, and Crowley would know because he’d been there. Aziraphale made him quiver and made him weak, made him stronger. Spice of Constantinople, indeed.

Crowley nudged his knee between Aziraphale’s thighs, both maneuvering his back into the balcony railing and leaning them over the edge. Wouldn’t be the end of the world if they fell, the sky and the Earth would bend for them, would give them every wish they wanted granted. “No, it isn’t productive.” 

Love bloomed in Crowley, exploding reassurance, piercing him through and squeezing every muscle wrapped around his ribs and lungs. Bubbles of it made him swoon, each subtle shift of Aziraphale’s tongue against his lips forcing his surrender. He pushed Aziraphale into the railing, sure, but Aziraphale was the one in charge. Just as he’d said.

At once, Aziraphale jerked Crowley closer by his knotted scarf, wrapping it around his hand and bodily hauling him in. A fizzle of delicious sparks shot straight down Crowley’s spine like he’d touched an electric fence. “This feels—”

“Good?” Aziraphale’s curls tickled Crowley’s brow. Crowley loved him, loved him, loved him.

“Better.”

Aziraphale raised his knee, pushing the hard line in his trousers into Crowley’s clothed erection. Crowley made a noise like he’d been stabbed, shot, gutted, into Aziraphale’s wet mouth, and thrusted against Aziraphale’s groin, his own firm cock straining against his zipper. They should’ve been doing this since the moment balconies were invented; everyone should’ve been doing this since balconies were invented.

Between labored breaths, Aziraphale rasped, “Have you got a plan?”

Strangely, one came to mind. Their corporations weren’t as fixed as Crowley believed a moment ago. “Actually; yes.”

  
  


-/-

_The Rest of Their Lives. The Ritz, London._

Aziraphale smiled at Crowley like they shared a secret. 

He leaned forward to begin a story, the shafted daylight in the dining room shifting around him like even tiny motes of dust not dare grace him. Crowley tilted his head onto one shoulder to better listen, and Aziraphale reached to settle his hand over Crowley’s on the tablecloth. 

Warmth bloomed over Crowley’s skin, shivering deep into every centimeter of flesh and tying his bones together, knitting itself into his core. Like a rose, it unfurled, spreading petals up his arm and into the next, crossing the heart and soothing his nerves and dissolving the rest of the world. The soft piano music and every other diner in the Ritz faded away, and so did everything in the world except for Aziraphale. Crowley felt each ridge of Aziraphale’s fingerprint skimming his knuckles. 

Humans felt like this. Angels could feel it. Love had crept into humans’ lives at the beginning and it had stayed there, residual and dormant; curled around sunny spots and lurking in deep trenches of emotion. It was a slumbering beast ready to awaken at the most inconvenient of times. Aziraphale allowed Crowley to feel it, and now all the time, whenever Crowley looked towards his counterpart, he felt. It’d only taken around six millennia to figure out the same trick that Aziraphale had known forever - Crowley _chose_ to feel it, and that was the secret.

This angel was special. Took Crowley all of thirteen seconds to work that out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes aziraphale called Crowley the spice of life no I don’t take constructive criticism


	3. Artwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This beautiful painting is by @lesbocrowley on tumblr! They are a seriously gifted painter (I mean, please compare the feeling of this scene in the fic to the feeling you get from looking at this art), and it meant the world to me that they decided to pick my fic in the GOBB to create for! Please check out their profile and send them all your love <3

France, 1945.

**Author's Note:**

> my Good Omens Big Bang fic! This is a BEHEMOTH, and was beta'd by the talented writer and artist @hollow-head on tumblr! The painting in Chapter 3 (1/25) is done by @lesbocrowley on tumblr ! Check back on Saturday for the final half of the fic and Emilie's painting.  
> This was a really big undertaking that I have been working on since July/August, and I thought that entering it in GOBB was a good way to make myself finish it in a semi-timely manner. I appreciate all the feedback and encouragement that both my beta and my artist have given me, and thanks to them, you all get a finished product that I am extremely proud of! I really enjoyed working with them and being a part of the GOBB chats and project. :) Now, enjoy the traipse through history.  
> Leave a comment!


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